Purple Haze
by AlwaysEatTheRude21
Summary: No one ever spoke about the troubles of the heroine or hero after the credits rolled. They never saw the castle crumble to ashes or the roses grow grey and wilt. Because life never really ended on a happy note, not when your name was Harriet Potter and you were being sent on an undercover mission. Harry/Kilgrave, Fem!Harry. HAITUS.
1. AKA: Hells Kitchen

Harriet Lillian Potter was exhausted, the kind of tired that would settle into your bones like lead and set up shop there for days to come. Apparating to America had taken it out of her, but it was the hour long briefing she had to sit through before her apparition from good old England that truly dug the dagger home.

Harriet, or plain old Harry as she preferred, worked for the department of magical law enforcement in the ministry, or more widely known, she was an Auror. The department itself was fissured into five major sectors. Division one handled the serious criminals, the insane bastards that went on murder sprees. Division two took care of the everyday mundane criminals, ranging from prank spells gone too far to would be Gringotts robbers. Division three listened to petty disputes over heir looms or anything else the magical community was squabbling over at the time. Division four sat for hours on end being the ministry's desk monkeys, filling out legislation like apparition licenses, broom licenses or the Wizengamot documents.

Finally, there was division five, who Harry had joined straight after her Auror training at the tender age of nineteen. The division P.A.W, aka the Protection And Welfare of magical creatures, was relatively small compared to the other departments, only in the last five years having been built into existence. At the time, when she had finally gotten her hands on her acceptance letter standing in the kitchen of Grimmauld place barefoot and pyjama clad, everyone had been shocked at her choice.

It was no secret she was a shoe in for division one, everyone expected her to take up that mantle, she had been baring that burden since she was eleven after all. So coloured them surprised, Weasleys included, when she had went to the burrow to give the good news. She really couldn't blame them, she too during her training had thought division one was a sure thing.

Who wouldn't? The chosen one carrying on the good fight for the safety of the little children tucked into their warm beds by smiling parents, it sounded like the perfect ending to a children's novel. Life however was nothing remotely as just or kind. No one ever spoke about the troubles of the heroine or hero after the credits rolled. They never saw the castle crumble or the roses wilt. The real endings were never happy enough for the general public to be able to swallow, so they would always make up their own endings. Harry knew this above all else.

The fact of the matter was Harry was tired of playing the role of the selfless heroine. Selfless heroes lost everything in the end, that's what the story books left out. She herself had given up too much already for people who wouldn't even give a second glance her way if they saw her bleeding to death in Knockturn alley.

Sirius, her parents, Remus, a safe and loving home, her god damned childhood. All gone like dust in the wind on the whims and wills of others older and more cunning then herself. Even the sanctity of her soul, her very core had been tarnished by being a Horcrux. There was some things you could never wash off, never bury deep enough. Having a shard of a mad man's soul lodged in your own soul, whispering poison in your ear was one of them. She was done, finished with giving up things for people who had no right in asking her to in the first place.

But atlas, as far as she had come from her sacrificial lamb days, she couldn't completely turn off her ability to care. She had a hero complex, one ingrained in her since pre-pubescence thanks to almighty Dumbledore. At twenty two, she was a big enough girl to admit it, even if it was only to herself.

So hunting down rogue creatures, preventing muggle exposure, and helping the spare few who deserved it was enough crumbs to feed her hero complex, but to simultaneously keep herself out of the direct line of fire that division one would have thrown her head first into.

Of course she should have known the universe would have the last laugh, it always did when it came to her. So after years of training, of being the trainee in the office were the big boys liked to play pointless pranks and filling out others case files while they went out drinking, when her very own first assignment had come slamming its way onto her desk in a thick wad of parchment, she shouldn't have been all that shocked at how things had gone down hill from there.

The assignment was vague at best, inauspicious at worst. The A.U.P.C, the American Union and the Protection of Creatures had called out for help from its over the pond cousin. Unusual? No, both the English and American magical ministries interlocked and wove together on more than a handful of occasions. What was bizarre was the lack of details present in such a long winded file.

There was one witness, who had not spoken to a single person yet. No picture of the creature, no name or species specified. All the thirty-two pages gave away could be fit onto two lines, the town that Harry would have to travel to, the witness's name, address and the date she would meet said witness. And finally the estimation of the duration of her stay in America. Which was considerably long due to the amount of facts she would have to dig out herself.

What really sent Harry's alarm bells ringing was there was no mention, none what-so-ever of what had tipped the A.U.P.C onto the case. No turn of events listed that should warrant an investigation, not even a suspected cause. Nothing. Nada. Silch. Jack fucking all.

She had to take it however, it was her first case, she couldn't be picky until she found her feet on more even ground, until she had a few solved cases under her belt. One trip or failing and she would be sent careening out of division five with the door slamming behind her forever.

It looked like Harry would have to face this blind, but that wouldn't be a first either. So like the good little Auror she wanted to portray to the world, she packed up only what she would need and left for a town called Hells kitchen of all names. With a few warm but brief goodbyes to the few who truly mattered to her, Hermione, Ron and the Weasleys, a pathetically short list in reality, Harry found her feet pounding on foreign soil.

Her first thought of the apartment the American ministry had set up for her was one of relief. Sure, it was no Hogwarts or Grimmauld place, but she had rested her head in worse places. The tent from when she was on the run and the Dursley's cupboard being but two she could name off the top of her head. The apartment building was rough around the edges, situated in a dubious neighbourhood, bit it held an odd beauty in an industrial way... And if Harry took her glasses off while she looked at it.

Sighing and glancing down, her small suitcase perched at her feet, Harry took one last glance to her apartment key that had come along with the file, memorized the number printed in black bold letters on a key chain and proceeded to shoulder the heavy metal and glass double doors open.

The lobby was deserted, but thankfully at the other end of the hollowed room was an lift. The wheels of her suitcase squeaked and squawked their protest obnoxiously on the linoleum flooring as she dragged it across the room and towards the lift, the noise grating on her ear drums considerately. The fluorescent light above her head flickered as she passed under it.

If you knew the right signs to look for, spotting a witch or wizard was not a hard task to complete. Malfunction of electronics in proximity of a witch or wizard being one of those hidden jewels to look for. The problem for inquisitive muggles, but the saving grace of the wizarding world was to know the hints, was you had to already know about their kind, excluding the illegal act of telling a muggle about their world. But to find out about Harry's kind, you had to read the riddles laid bare before you. The one thing that was stopping the two societies, two abundantly different worlds they walked in from colliding irrevocably was a simple but irrefutable paradox. Mother nature had one nasty sense of humour.

Edging into the lift with sluggish limbs, jerking her suitcase in from behind her, Harry turned around and smashed her floors number into the control panel. The sooner she got settled in, the sooner she could get some shut eye and the sooner she could finish this case.

Who knows what this nameless and faceless person had been through, or had put other people through. The sooner he/she was in safety, or more than likely arrested, the sooner Harry got to drag her arse back home. Whatever this person did or did not do, it was enough to catch the gaze of the A.U.P.C, big enough for them to go gunning for one single person. Normally this type of response, undercover recon and quick actions was only left for the bigger things, like an Inferi outbreak or the new settlement of a werewolf pack.

This only made Harry more tired and anxious to get stuck in and get it over with. She needed to pursue this with extreme caution. Not only had the ministry thrown her into the deep end blind on her first swim, the bastards had thrown her into the whirlpool tank with a bloody shark in it. Trust the ministry to try and fuck her over one last time, just for good measure. This was payback for her hand in the destruction of the ministries opulent head office in her fifth year, she was of it.

The muted swooshing of the lift doors opening brought Harry out of her pessimistic thoughts. Straightening herself out, Harry left the slightly claustrophobic lift and entered the narrow but long hallway that led to her apartment. With a harsh tug of her arm, her suitcase sprang free from its snag on the lifts doorway. When the case was free Harry finally looked up and out into the hallway, her steps faltering at the scene playing out before her.

Three muggles, a man and two women were crowded around each other. One woman, with hair a shade lighter than Harry's own raven locks was standing bathed in yellow light from the bare bulbs above, arms tensed and crossed over her leather clad chest, foot tapping away impatiently on the sticky floor. A frown was puckered between her arched brows, the flush of anger blossoming on cheeks. Harry couldn't blame the woman, she would be pissed too if she had a livid red haired, half dressed woman getting in her face like that, a willowy finger jabbing closer and closer to the brunettes face with every passing second. The man was doing nothing, a bystander by all looks of it, if it wasn't for his own flushed and worried face and twiddling of his fingers, a nervous habit Harry guessed, giving his participation away.

Now, Harry wouldn't normally get involved. She would have normally lowered her head and walked right passed the arguing muggles. But of course, with the day she was having, they had to be warring outside her flaky painted apartments door. Because them being anywhere else, preferably far away from Harry with the mood she was in would be too much to ask for. At that one moment, Harry had half the mind to floo call both ministries and tell them to go fuck themselves. Thankfully, sanity won out.

Huffing to herself in exasperation, Harry made her way over to the the small group and tried to inconspicuously scuttle around them to get to her apartment. That was futile Harry realized when she got close enough, the two red heads were barring her door rather well. Dropping her suitcase with a loud thud to the floor, Harry spoke up, seeing no other option.

"Excuse me."

The brunette woman and the ginger man simply flickered their gaze her way, however the ginger woman twirled in a flutter of her beaded top, body tensing as if she was ready to ponce on Harry in a moments notice.

"You're excused. Now go away."

The words were pressed out of the red haired woman's bared teeth, and as quickly as she had took notice of Harry, she had equally turned back around to the brunette woman, carrying on her tirade accompanied with eccentric hand gestures. Harry had to clench her right hand and bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from sending a stinging hex towards the rude woman. Breathing through her nose, in hopes of centring herself, Harry gave it one more try.

"No really, excuse me. You're standing in front of my door and I want to get past."

The angry woman huffed loudly and snapped back to Harry's direction, looking non too pleased at being interrupted again. Harry couldn't care less, the whole woman, from her panties and beaded shirt, to her glittering scarf she was using as a headband rubbed Harry the wrong way from the get go. Add in her obnoxious and rude behaviour, well if the red head wasn't careful, Harry would just give up and whip her wand out. After all, there was always the option of obliviate.

"Can't you see I'm in the middle of something? So take your little self and accent and-"

"If I were you I would not finish that sentence. Ever. I have been having a bloody day and a half, so this will be the last time I ask nicely. Move or I'll move you myself."

The red haired woman's lips thinned, almost as sharp as a blade, and curled up at one corner. She looked ready to explode, and Harry was almost welcoming it, to get some of the built up tension and anger out at something, anyone, when Harry made the mistake of glancing towards the man. Obviously red and crazy didn't like her looking at him, as she jumped forward and got close to Harry's face.

"I get it, you want him too don't you? Well get you grimy eyes off him, he's mine!"

Harry put her loss of control on her emotions down to her tiredness, the fact she was stuck in a country where she knew no one and the red head in her face, but the results of her loss of control was evident enough when one of the dangling bulbs of lights a few feet away from them shattered into a glittering shower of broken glass. Thankfully it gave the group Harry had found herself with a distraction, long enough of one for Harry to regain the hold on her magic and her emotions.

The brunette only stared for a moment, but the ginger woman scampered closer to the man, practically bending herself around him. If possible, Harry would have thought the woman would have jumped into his skin.

"This isn't finished Jessica, stay away from him. And you too Snow White. I'll know if you don't."

Then the two red heads were off down the hallway in the opposite direction of the broken light, huddling into an ajar apartment door and slamming it behind them, leaving Harry and the brunette in their wake.

"What the hell is that woman's issue?"

Harry hadn't meant to have spoken, it just seemed to slip out from her lips. Five minutes in America and she had already ran into a crazy, so was the way of her luck. What was next? Werewolves? Cornish Pixies? Harry sent up a silent prayer for no Inferi. Ever since getting the locket Horcrux with Dumbledore, watching as those... Things crawled out of the water after them, Harry had grown a slight fear of them, and a more than slight fear of drowning.

"Don't worry about Robyn. You live here and have a pair of tits, she's got it out for you. But she's harmless enough."

"Well... Fuck."

The brunette, Jessica according to the woman, who she now knew was called Robyn, was already partially turned away from her. Jessica's defensive posture was down slightly, her arms now being down her side rather than across her chest, but Harry could tell by the hard sheen in her eyes that her guard wasn't fully down. Then Jessica was looking at her quizzically.

"What's your name anyway? Not many people move in here."

The hard look in her eyes had grown into a full blown brick wall before Harry could blink. The amount of time it took for Jessica to go from distant to interrogatory was almost jarring, if Harry hadn't have known men like Mad-eye Moody. But she had, and she knew a battle scarred person when she saw one. Harry was one herself, she saw it in the mirror every time she could bring herself to look. But the question was why this seemingly normal woman would hold such a look herself. It wasn't a common occurrence. Harry decided to play it safe, no need to arouse suspicion before the first day had even ended after all.

"Harry potter. You?"

Jessica's chin rose up a little at Harry's answer, meaning as she was slightly taller than Harry anyway, Jessica had to look down at her. No matter if the action was sub-conscious or accidental, Harry despised being looked down on. She had to put up with that her whole life, she wouldn't take it from complete strangers.

"Harry? Isn't that a guys name?"

Harry eyed the brunette up and down, not quite sure what the muggles angle was. Was she being condescending? Was it just an innocent question? But there was no smirk that normally accompanied peoples jests and jabs at her name, so Harry believed it was the latter. Innocent until proven guilty and all that inane justice quotes people sprouted as if they knew anything about true justice. Harry was more of a fuck 'em all until they proved useful type of girl.

"Short for Harriet."

"Ah, well my names Jessica Jones, I live just a few doors down from you. Need anything, come and get me."

Then Jessica was turning on the ball of her boot encased feet and was marching down the hallway without so much of a goodbye, and finally Harry thought she had figured out what the muggles hook was. Socially awkward. Or at the least socially anxious. In that respect, Harry could more than sympathize with her.

Now Harry had two options. Option one, head into her apart and push this whole encounter into the back of her mind. Or option two, follow Jessica and try and strike up a conversation with the woman. Which with the task Harry was on would be more than useful, because in facing the facts, Harry knew near to nothing about America, let alone this town in the middle of nowhere.

This woman was obviously a local, she would know the layout of the town, know which places to go for what occasion, she would know the ins and outs of town and most importantly, she could possible know of something strange that had happened here, the thing that had tweaked the A.U.P.C in the first place. Something that would give Harry a direction to hunt in. And if it turned out Jessica knew nothing, then making a possibly alley, or dare she say it friend, couldn't hurt surely?

So, Harry quickly unlocked her apartment door, dumped her suitcase in the black depths of the room, and locked up just as fast as she had opened it. When she started following Jessica down the hallway, Harry noticed how fast the woman had clocked on to being followed, too fast for a normal every day Joe to do so.

Jessica carried on walking down the hall, but span her head around to face her even though her steps carried on their echoing movement. One eyebrow was raised high on her head in silent question, and Harry grinned at the woman.

"What? You said if I need anything to come to you. You look like you have a good stash of alcohol hidden away and I REALLY need a drink."

Harry almost sighed in relief when Jessica didn't take it the wrong way, instead for her efforts, Harry had gotten a half smile, measly but from the type of woman Harry guessed she was dealing with, it was a mile stone. Even small steps were progress after all.

"I think we're going to get along just fine."

Harry only grinned wider at Jessica in affirmation. Then when they came to the end of the hallway, Harry saw Jessica come to a stop at a door. Not worrying really, apart from the glass pane in the middle had been smashed to smithereens. The remnants of the pane still littering the floor around Jessica's door haphazardly. Now it was time for Harry's eyebrow to make an ascent.

"How'd your door get so busted in?"

Jessica's half life smile became a fully fledge grin, and despite Harry originally wanting to make the woman smile, she couldn't help but find the gesture almost ominous now as she was faced with it. Jessica's next words didn't help calm Harry any more than her smile did.

"Welcome to Hells Kitchen Harry."

* * *

 **A.N** \- I have no idea how this fic is going to go down with readers. I did do a poll, for the ones who read my other stories, of which character pairings people would like to see, and Hermione/Kilgrave won out. But as you see, I changed Hermione to a genderswaped Harry.

Why? Because I can and to be perfectly honest, it just sort of happened while I started writing. Plus, I just see Harry blending into the Jessica Jones universe better than Hermione would, and the genderswap was for fun. XD

On to the most important thing. **WARNING** for those of you who are sensitive, or find Kilgrave triggering **DO NOT READ THIS FIC**. Take this as fair warning. Kilgrave is his own walking trigger, so just keep that in mind. And before anyone continues on reading this story and then starts reviewing or me about how Kilgrave is such a horrible character, how I'm a rape apologist or any other nonsense, I have one thing to stay before you do.

Don't waist your time. The reason I like Kilgrave as a fictional character is because of how twisted he is. Does that mean I condone anything he has done? No, but he is a FICTIONAL character, and to be honest, I'm fed up of people trying to stick solutions to real world issues onto fictional characters. Of course fictional worlds and characters are a great option of fleshing out real situations and actions, to explore certain aspects of humanity, even those we would rather not acknowledge. But If you really want to do something about these horrible real world situations, instead of sitting at your computer and writing accusatory emails or rants, go out and volunteer at a women's shelter, donate money to a charity that does the great work, do something positive instead of pointlessly negative things. Ragging on some ones fanfic of all things isn't going to change anything in the real world, it's just not how things work. So do something positive!

The thing many people are simply not getting, is if we stop talking about characters like Kilgrave, his influences or the things that drive him, then we will start to hush up on the real topic here. Talking, in any form, is a way to spread awareness, to open peoples eyes.

And as a writer, a person who likes the darker aspects of fictional worlds and people, I will not let someone stifle my creativeness or stop me from doing something I enjoy doing in my spare time for fun. Criticism is fine, actually great, but down right flaming for a choice of including a certain character is not. So you have your warning, this is obviously going to be a dark fic, so turn back while you still can.

I'm sorry for the awfully long winded rant, I just wanted it out there before the real story starts. Hopefully this will be the only rant attached to this story.

 **AS FOR MY OTHER FICS** : I can't decide will be updated soon, I promise and as the poll is finished, I can say that the three that won out is obviously the Kilgrave one, then Matt Murdock/ Hermione which will be out around saturday/Sunday and the Ragnar/Hermione one, which will be out Tuesday, Wednesday latest.

As for people who actually like the weird turns my brain sometimes take, thank you for reading and if anyone has a spare moment or two, a review would be great. ;)


	2. AKA: The English Accent

Harry pushed her prescription lens sunglasses up farther on her face groggily as she stumbled down the crowded streets to a little café shop at the end of the road. She was hungover, her head was pounding like a bass player and her stomach was doing acrobats, but she had no other option but to head out today whether she wanted to be safely wrapped in blankets or not. Far away from the searing sunlight that burned her shaded eyes and made her head pound to an even harsher tempo. She was meeting the witness today and this she couldn't miss, not if she wanted to get anywhere in this case.

She had stayed up too late last night, trading mundane talk with Jessica over glasses of whiskey before they both called it quits and Harry walked, more like staggered, to her apartment. She had not even made it to the bed, instead she passed out on the sofa like a starfish.

Harry hadn't gotten anything out of the woman regarding anything suspicious in Hells Kitchen, but she did make the first fragile tendril of a connection to her. Of course it was going to be a long road till full fledged friendship, both Jessica's and Harry's personalities requiring such, but at least she had taken the first baby steps onto it. In all fairness, so had Jessica.

Coming to a stop at the small but quaint café, Harry scanned the outdoor tables with weary eyes. Most of the people frequenting the shop were segregated off in pairings, only one well dressed woman was sitting by herself at an outside metal table. By the way her eyes fluttered around, how stiffly she was perched in her chair and how alien she looked in such a common setting, this was the witch Harry was looking for.

Arielle Blackwood from an old American wizarding family that had migrated from Ireland. Thirty-seven, prim and proper, working for the line trackers, or in muggle terms, she was a Genealogist that tracked family lines as far back as they would go. After all in the glorious world Harry lived in, you were only worth how far your family line could be traced.

Harry strolled over, pulled a chair out and flopped on to it none too gracefully, too tired to act anything other than how she was feeling. The woman opposite her had the gall to crinkle her nose up in distaste at her behaviour or lack of manners. Harry didn't give a fuck. She had put up with the Malfoy's for years, this woman had nothing on them. Excluding Narcissa, Harry actually liked that woman.

"Are you Harry Potter?"

Nodding briskly, but wincing when her head thumped harder, Harry picked up the laminated menu, waved a waiter over with a flick of her wrist and ordered a gin and tonic. Hair of the dog as the Irish said, surely Arielle would appreciate that. By the up turned face and twist of her brow, she didn't and was more than slightly offended that Harry hadn't spoken to her yet.

"Look, I'm sure you have better things to do, I do too. So we'll keep this as brief as possible, I'll get your statement and then we can both be on our merry way. Deal?"

Arielle gave a sharp nod, more of a jilt of the head than anything else and crossed her arms over her well pressed designer shirt. At least they both wanted the same thing, to get away from each other as soon as possible. The waiter came back and dropped Harry's drink in front of her, the lime slice almost fell off as the liquid sloshed up the side, but didn't quite make it out of the tall glass. Glancing up, Harry gave a polite smile as thanks and then set to work in pulling a note pad and pen from her messenger bag as the waiter left to get back to his job. After everything had been set up for note taking, Harry took a fair size gulp of her drink.

"Start from the beginning, the very beginning. Where you were when this happened, what you were doing there. Everything, no matter how small. It might be the thing that leads us to this case being closed."

Harry wandlessly placed a muffling and disillusion charm around them for safety and secrecy. Merlin forbid the muggle's surrounding them heard anything they were about to talk about. No, it was best they weren't heard and weren't taken notice of. Picking up her ball point pen, a quill being too ostentatious for bringing out in general public, Harry tapped it against her cheep notepad as Arielle straightened in her seat, gaining a far away look in her eyes.

"I had just left the Salem's institute of records. I was working on a job for a client that's family had been involved in the Salem's witch trials when it happened. I was too tired for apparition and the floo network doesn't link up to Hells Kitchen, so I had to take the subway home. Ghastly thing if you ask me, nothing but sweaty bodies pressing up against one another, muggle's everywhere talking nonsense-"

Harry gave the woman a harsh cough to cut her off from her tirade. Not only did Harry not want to hear another pureblood prattle on about their poorly hidden contempt for muggle's, but the woman was also getting off track. Thankfully the woman snapped to, giving her a look as if noticing who she was talking to for the first time and actually managed to looked sheepish at being caught out. But she recovered all too quickly and was back on spinning her tale.

"As I was saying, I was on the subway and had just left when I bumped into a man. He's the one you're looking for. He told me-"

"What did he look like?"

Harry stopped the tedious tapping of her pen and got ready to jot down notes. Not all creatures had obvious signs of their species printed on their skin, but more did then didn't. Scars often led to werewolves. A shine to the skin, like a light coat of glitter that looked like a make-up artist or a toddler had gone crazy often hinted at a Fae descendant. Gnarled features or warts spoke of a relation to trolls. Obviously this man, who had walked through a subway was none of the major, or fully blooded creatures. If she was dealing with anything at all, her best guess was a half-breed of some sort.

Pixies, Inferi or Mermaids couldn't exactly get around inconspicuously without outing themselves and the magical world. So that whittled it down to about... 120 different cross species. Harry rubbed her forehead, her fingers dancing across her scar. An old habit she had never been able to kick.

"He looked... Muggle. Normal even. He was tall, slender, around thirty-five. English accent, brown hair, brown eyes. Impeccably dressed I must say. The suit he was wearing was from that muggle designer, what's its name... Armani! That's it Armani! Say what you want about muggle's, but some know how to dress."

This was going to be a long, long day, Harry could tell. If Arielle kept getting diverted off track, she and Harry would get no where. At least Harry knew why A.U.P.C had called in for P.A.W. The suspect was English, due to international wizarding law, the retribution and arrest of this man fell onto their shoulders. You guys made him, you guys fix it sort of deal.

"Did he have any scars? Did his skin look glittery? Ashen, like a dead body warmed over? Warts? Anything distinguishing?"

Arielle frowned deeply, almost confused by Harry's question. Harry wouldn't be surprised if the woman had only taken note of his dress sense, or thought his looks didn't matter if she could detail his suit in memorizing clarity. If only her job was as easy as this woman in front of her believed it to be.

"No, none. He looked normal. Handsome even."

This was getting nowhere fast. How the hell was Harry meant to hunt this bastard down if she couldn't point him out from the crowd? And why was she even looking into this if the man looked muggle? Was this a prank from the higher ups in division five, a sort of initiation process? A fake case before a real one would come her way, a practice of some sorts?

"Tell me what happened."

"Well, I bumped into him. He asked me my name and I told him. He asked me what I did for a living and I... I told him."

Harry flung her pen down, watching as it bounced a little on the padding of the her paper. She was here because this woman had a crush on a muggle? Then something tweaked in Harry's brain. Arielle had told him what she did for a living? Did she tell him a cover or what she actually did? Surely she couldn't be so stupid, so easily fooled?

"What did you tell him Misses Blackwood?"

Arielle got red in the face, the colour mottling her peach and slightly tanned skin. Her fingers clasped in her lap tightly and she swallowed deeply, looking down at her hands in what Harry could pin as guilt. With the more time that was passing, the more Harry believed this whole thing to be a joke on her. No one, not even Goyle would out the secret so simply, despite his only one working brain cell.

"I told him the truth. I said I track pureblood wizarding families. Honestly, I swear on my life I didn't mean to. He just asked and before I could think, it was out there. I didn't want to say it, but I did anyway. It was like he cast a spell on me! It wasn't my fault!"

Now this is where things got interesting and infinitely more difficult to untangle. As snobbish and judgemental as Arielle seemed to be, she didn't seem the type to be an air head. She ran a successful business, researched for a living, managed her parents estates. Harry doubted she would slip so easily, no matter the suit the man was wearing. How had he wrangled it out of her then?

"You just told him? He didn't cast a spell? He didn't make eye contact? He just asked and you told him. You outed the big secret just like that?"

The red in her face transformed from embarrassment to down right anger as she scowled at Harry. Her fingers now clenching in restraint rather than nerves. Harry could only look on at the woman in wonder.

"No, I would know if the fucker had cast a spell on me. And he was looking behind me when he asked me. It doesn't matter, he didn't believe me. He actually laughed... Laughed at me of all people!"

Harry huffed tiredly, flopping backwards into her seat. What was that muggle nursery rhyme she had heard aunt Petunia singing to Dudley once from her cupboard? Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry, here we go round the mulberry bush, so early in the morning.

The woman had obviously left something out. The A.U.P.C wouldn't get involved in something as simple as this. They would have sent division two in, obliviated the muggle and called it a day. So Harry decided to cut the bullshit and ask the woman straight out what had caused her to come all this way for something as straight forward as this.

"What did you do Misses Blackwood? We both know I wouldn't be here if something else hadn't of gone down."

"Well, he laughed and told me to disappear. I had hardly had any magic left, I was exhausted. Apparition would have been impossible for me to do at that time. But, like when he asked me what I did for a living, it just happened. I apparated in front of him. I ended up in the hospital for three weeks due to my magical core being fractured due to over use. I'm still not fully able to use my magic because of this... Because some muggle gave me an order! Even the staff at the hospital said it should have been impossible. I should NOT have been able to do it. It was like he forced me to. He made me do it! But he wasn't a wizard, he had no wand and I would have known if he cast a spell on me. But there's no other explanation other then he Im-"

"Imperiused you."

Fucking hell. This... This was a shit storm. A seemingly muggle man being able to Imperio people? That didn't make a lick of sense. It shouldn't be possible. However from the tears glistening in Arielle's eyes and the frantic tone her voice had taken on, Harry believed every word she had spewed. Harry had been lied to enough in her life to be able to spot a liar, unfortunately Arielle wasn't one. This was deeper than Harry had originally believed.

"Was there anything... Anything at all that seemed odd, different about the man?"

There had to be something. Muggle people couldn't tap into their kind of magic. But if he was a wizard, he would have been registered or on file somewhere, he would have been found by now. He would have been found before he could have left the bloody subway system.

"The smell. He smelled of roses, cotton and freshly pressed money. His face, the whole exchange is a bit blurry, but I remember that smell more than anything."

Harry's mind stalled for a second before it geared back up into a frantic swirl of thoughts and theories. Smell, that was a useful hint. That crossed off a lot of names on her mental species list. Something else clicked in her brain. The smell Arielle had described was very self representative.

Arielle was wearing a rather thick smog of rose perfume, the type that clogged in the back of your throat that you were be able to taste hours later. She was also wearing cotton, designer, but still a basic fabric. And from the shiny Italian leather kitten heals to her shark skin bag, the woman loved money. The smell was to her liking, pieced together for immediate pleasing to Arielle herself. She smelled what she wanted to, what she liked to smell. Just one more question and Harry thought she might have figured out what she was dealing with.

"Have you ever brewed Amortentia Misses Blackwood?"

"Yes in my school years. What does that have to do with anything?"

Arielle answered her in confused jagged words. Her pitch escalating in height to an indignant level by the time she had finished. Harry kept on pushing however, she needed to know this answer. If she was right, not only was she in deeper shit than she thought, but she would have to pay a visit to an old friend as soon as she could. Someone who knew intimately about this species Harry had an inkling she was dealing with.

"What did it smell like when you brewed the Amortentia?"

"Well... Well damn. Roses, cotton and freshly pressed money. What does this mean?"

Harry ignored Arielle and got up from her seat, cramming her pen and notepad back into the blackness of her own tatty bag. She was working against time here and she needed to apparate back to England to visit someone to get the full details. She may know what species she was dealing with, but with how secretive, rare and allusive as they were, she knew nothing other than the name and the fact they naturally exuded pheromones that take on the properties of smelling Amortentia.

"It means I have my work cut out for me. Thanks for taking the time to speak to me, but I have to get to work. Goodbye and I hope you heal soon Misses Blackwood."

Harry reached over and downed the rest of her gin and tonic, needing the liquid courage and for the pounding in her head to subside. Then she was off back down the busy street, leaving a flustered and confused Arielle Blackwood behind. When the crowds of roaming Hells Kitchen inhabitants thinned out, Harry took a sharp left down an empty alley way and darted behind the big wheeler bin pushed up against a brick wall. With one last glance around her, seeing if she was truly alone, Harry was gone with a tug to the stomach, a swirl of colours and nothing left in her wake.

Her feet landed on soft sand with a muted thud. Harry immediately regretted apparating when her stomach churned violently. Hangovers and apparition did not mix at all. Luckily, she managed to reign in the feeling and keep her stomach contents where they belonged. Inside of her.

Once the world stopped spinning, Harry set off to the little trail leading to a slightly lopsided house and through the picket fence that led to Shell cottage. Coming to the door, harry rapped her knuckled on the light blue painted wood and waited. After a muffled 'hold on' coming from inside, the door creaked open after a few moments wait and Harry was met with a bed haggled Fleur Delacour. Harry had totally forgotten about the time difference, but she couldn't wait, not with this. So she spoke, not waiting for Fleur to even utter a sleepy hello.

"Tell me everything you know on Veela's."

* * *

"So, why do you want to know about Veela's?"

Harry was sat on a driftwood chair that was pushed up to a breakfast bar in Shell Cottage, Fleur was adjacent to her, putting together what was needed for a good cup of tea. Harry had to give it to the French woman, had someone in the state Harry had been in come knocking to her door in the middle of the night, sprouting nonsense, she wouldn't have calmly led them into her house and offered a warm drink.

"The case I'm working on, the one in the states? I think it involves a Veela."

Fleur hummed as she swirled a silver spoon around in her mug of steaming tea, eyes glancing out the window behind them at the glittering stars and full moon. Bill was likely out for a jog, although he didn't turn on a full moon, he couldn't sleep or sit still either. He also had a penchant for rare steak.

"Muggle or Wizardry descended?"

Harry looked up from her own amber coloured drink, eyeing Fleur wearily. She had no idea there was different types, let alone that the types had trickled into anything other than the wizarding world and its population. She shouldn't have been surprised. The Veela's that were out about their heritage never spoke about what it actually meant to be one. The only things taught about them where their smell, pheromones they produced when in search of their mate and when angered how vicious they could be.

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters! As odd as this sounds Zarri, muggle descended Veela are so much more dangerous than their wizarding counterparts."

Although Fleur's English had come a long way over the years, the blonde still had extreme trouble wrapping her tongue around Harry's name. Instead she bastardized it into something that sounded some-what similar, Zarri. Harry didn't mind it, in fact she quite liked it. Fleur was the first person to ever give her a nickname. In a way, especially the months following the war, it made her feel more normal, more human rather than a weapon to be picked up and used and then discarded when no longer needed.

"How? Surely the wizarding kind with magic on their side would be the more dangerous of the two?"

Fleur tutted at her with a shake of her blonde curls, the gold dancing and glinting in the dim light of the kitchen lamp.

"Oh Zarri, you do not know what you have fallen in do you? Veela's are not human, well at least they weren't a couple of thousand years ago. Back then, for whatever reason, they bread into other species, creating half-breeds, or what we call and know today as Veela. Most half-breeds died out, the weaker breeds likely. All apart from the muggle and wizardry lines. Wizarding Veela are at least tempered, their already magical blood binding the Veela's instincts. With muggle Veela? They have no magic to hold it back, the Veela nature has no holds barred. In short it has free reign."

Well that sounded a lot darker than what Harry had believed Veela's to be. Normally when one thought of the darker species of magical creatures, werewolves, trolls and Inferi were the first to cross ones mind. Veela normally came bottom, if thought of at all.

"I thought Veela were all about never ending love. Mates and all that jazz?"

Fleur's delicate nose crinkled up as if she had tasted something vile, her head shaking left to right more violently then it did earlier.

"Merlin no. Wizarding Veela don't even have a mate, only the muggle ones do. And even then it has nothing to do with love. Mon Dieu, I blame all those tacky witches romance novels."

"Then why do the muggle Veela have one at all if the wizarding ones don't?"

Fleur took a sip from her mug and gently placed it on the table, turning to give Harry her full attention. Harry felt like a thirteen year old again sitting in potions, with robes to large for her small frame, getting ready for a lecture from professor Snape.

"Because all Veela, no matter their ancestry have what we call a calling. In wizarding Veela's it's easily blended with their magical nature, it will show out as an exceptional talent in a subject. Mine for instance is transfiguration, it comes naturally to me, almost like breathing. Muggle Veela's have the same gift. A seemingly magical ability that would be uncannily like a spell from a witch or wizard, but no wand or magic necessary. Though unlike Wizardry Veela's, they have no magical core to ground it, to gain control of it. You'll find almost, no, every muggle Veela will have a witch or wizard as a link... A mate. They need it as a kind of..."

"Conduit. Something to link their calling to, to ground it like you said. So really it's not mates at all, more of a parasitic or symbiotic relationship?"

Fleur smiled at her brightly, clicking her fingers as if to say bingo.

"Yes, exactly. It has nothing to do with romance or love. It's more along the lines of self preservation."

"Self preservation?"

Harry understood the whole linking thing, even about their powers needing to be grounded. But self preservation? What had that got to do with anything? Did they explode after too long? A ticking time bomb?

"Because left unlinked, or un-mated as people call it, the calling grows too strong in them. Forcing them to try and link to someone, anyone. Most likely someone who resembles their mate. This of course only leads to further disintegration of their sanity."

"But if it's just a connection they need, why not link to any witch or wizard they cross paths with?"

If this whole thing was broken down to the simplest of terms, then all this was about was survival. The chance of survival was ten times greater if the Veela had more options of linking instead of the one in a billion chance of running into the 'perfect match' that seemed to be what Fleur was talking about.

"No ones really sure. The best guess I've heard is like all magic, like choosing your wand, there needs to be a near perfect harmony between the calling and the magical core of the mate. To slot together, they need to be the right peg to the right hole so to say."

Harry sighed gently, lifted her own mug, blew and took a sip. She could feel a headache coming on, but if she was going to put a full stop on this case she needed all the information she could get her hands on. With Fleur being part Veela herself, no matter how small the fraction of Veela blood cursing through her veins, she was the best source to get that information from.

"So all I need to do is find this Veela's mate and he should settle?"

"It really depends. How old is he?"

Not being able to pick the number off the top of her head, Harry dived a hand blindly into her bag, fingers fishing for her notepad. When her finger tips brushed the sleek cover, she plucked it out and turned it to the right page, rattling off the details she had written there in chicken scrawl that even she had difficulty in reading.

"Eye witness said around thirty-five."

Fleur's shock was instantaneous as she coughed and spluttered her hot tea down her chin, frantically wiping at the dribble once the cough subsided. Her clear blue eyes had grown large, almost comically so on her small face.

"What? And he hasn't self destructed yet?! He hasn't taken people down with him? Are you completely sure he has no mate? No Veela ever in our long history has survived that long without being linked."

"Yes, I'm sure. It was the thing that made me think of Veela's in the first place. He's producing pheromones Fleur. The witness practically handed me that info on a silver platter. I may not know much about Veela's but I do know they stop producing those pheromones after they have mated, or linked as you like to call it."

Then the colour drained from Fleur's face, her shock turning to deadly seriousness as she levelled Harry with such a heavy look that Harry could feel it pressing down on her shoulders and chest. Fleur's voice was clipped when she spoke, words short but full of concealed meaning, her French accent twanging at the edges of her voice. That was never a good sign when Fleur's accent coloured her words. She was either angry or extremely worried. Neither boded well for Harry and this case.

"Tell me Zarri, what can he do? What is his calling?"

Harry searched Fleur's guarded eyes, trying to find the sudden reason for her abrupt change of attitude towards this conversation. One moment she felt like she was in a classroom, now it felt more like the hangman's noose tightening for her bared neck. The change in atmosphere was jarring.

"From what the eye witness had said, something resembling a Imperio."

Fleur's eyes crunched up tight for a moment before she was back at staring at Harry with perfect aim, almost frighteningly still if Harry couldn't see from her seat Fleur's chest rising and falling.

"Get out of there. Don't go back. Quit if you have to, just don't get involved in this."

Now it was Harry's time to splutter and be for a loss of words. Fleur couldn't mean that surely? Harry had trained for years for this job, jumped through countless hoops, put up with a lot of stick from other people to call it quits before the ball really started rolling.

"What? Why?"

"Because sweet Zarri like with everything else to do with magic, it goes back to a persons emotions, their personality. A Veela with the gift of... Of a unforgivable of all things is not someone to poke a stick at. Not someone to venture near. Veela's are unpredictable at the best of times, this man, whoever he may be is not someone you should face, especially not on your own."

But what other choice did Harry have? It was either do this or end up jobless and without meaning. No purpose to her life to speak of. That's what she thought she hated most after the war, the no sense of direction she had felt. There was no longer anyone telling her what she should or needed to do. No bodies to fight past. Nothing but an eerie silence that haunted her more than any of the dead bodies that littered Hogwarts flooring. Including Remus's and Tonk's horrific ones.

And if she did leave her job, then the silence would be back full force, smoking around her, choking the life out of her like a weed. She knew it would, and if it was in her power to stop that from happening, she sure as hell would give it a go. Moving, running, doing anything at all was the only thing to keep the nightmares at bay, the voice that sounded suspiciously like Voldemort from entering her dreams. She had put everything she had into her job, and so far it was working, it was keeping her mind from wondering. She couldn't give that up.

"But if we get his mate to him then he will settle won't he?"

"At thirty-five the insanity is already too deeply rooted. He's already likely tried to link to someone, another muggle I would guess. Became obsessed as well. Would you really link some poor soul to that? Because once eye contact is made, there's no going back. there's no reversal to this, once happened that is it. Because of the... Tangled but deep power of the connection, they will be able to pick up on each others memories given time. When one gets a paper cut, the other will also in the exact same place, no matter if that person was near paper or not. When one dies, the other will follow within the second. The only upside, if you can call it that at all, is this man's calling wont work on them. You of all people Zarri know what it's like to have a maniac run rampant through your mind. Would you really damn a person to the same fate as that, only this time permanently?"

Harry winced, and winced hard at Voldemort's temporary inhabitance of her mind being brought up. Of course she couldn't do that, the thought alone made her want to retch. But at the same time, she couldn't back out from this. She needed to do something. So if there was only one option left, as much as she didn't want to take it, as much as her body and mind rebelled against the idea, she was left with no other choice. Harry almost laughed then, not in humour but in quietly hidden despair. Even after so many years since the passing of the war, her options were still so limited, so boxed in.

"No, no I wouldn't. You know that and I don't appreciate you throwing that in my face. But I still need to go back. Someone needs to finish this. To... Neutralize the Veela. This is my job."

Harry's last sentence held more meaning then she meant for it to. It was more of herself trying to convince herself of a lie. Tell it to yourself often enough and you should start believing it. A re-stated fact she could not run from. This was the path she chose and she would follow it. But for once, just once, she wished it didn't have to end in death.

Fleur got up from her seat and walked around the breakfast bar to Harry, wrapping her night gown closer tighter around her, as if trying to stave off an imaginary chill.

"Just be careful Zarri. If you are right and this man has a calling of an unforgivable, it speaks a lot about the type of person he is. And please don't become a stranger again, it's been too long since I saw you last. I know Bill and the Weasley's miss you greatly."

Harry dejectedly nodded. Biting her lip, Harry got up from her seat and gave Fleur a quick hug. How could she tell them that the reason she didn't visit often, couldn't bring herself to, is because they all looked so happy? So at peace with their lives. It felt like a slap in the face to Harry, something she could never reach, but its shadow was always just there at her finger tips.

"I wont. Thanks for helping me out Fleur. I'll see you soon, give Bill my love for me will you?"

With a nod from Fleur and a worried glance to take home with her, Harry was off back to America in a pop of sound, feeling like she was going to a funeral. In a way she was, either hers or this Veela's. Because at the end of the day, only one of them would be coming out of this. It was her job after all.

* * *

Harry pushed the door of her apartment building door open mindlessly, her mind churning over the new information Fleur had given her. As she walked to the lift with heavy footsteps, Harry tried to reconcile with what she had to do. Killing in a battle field was easy, easier to push back to the farthest edges of your mind and blame the situation. In a battlefield it was either you or them. But this? This was a whole new board game.

She would have to hunt this person down and put them out of their misery. It was animalistic, a predator hunting the prey. It tore away her humanity and made her nothing better than a dog let off the leash. Was that why they had sent her? Was she really just a mindless animal to use when they needed? A rabid animal to shove into the cage when the times called for peace?

Fleur's words echoed in the recess of her mind and Harry had to reconsider. Was she really the predator here? If she did run into this Veela, this unstable individual with the power of Imperio, was she really going to be the one coming out with a heart beat? Because he would fight, they all did... She did when deatheaters and Voldemort had come knocking at the door for her head.

Then again, Harry had enough near brush's with death under her already. You didn't get the moniker of 'Mistress of death' for any old thing. Especially not by pureblood's who simultaneously hated her guts but were also the ones to bequeath her with said title.

As a fifteen year old she hadn't understood, not fully anyway. When the war was raging, she was the bad guy in the eyes of many. She was the phantom that lurked in the shadows. She was their Voldemort, come to tear their castles and families down to tatters around her dainty feet.

She didn't know if the title was a jab at her character, a permanent reminder of what she was to them, a harbinger of death, or a compliment. It didn't matter either way, it is what it is and Harry couldn't change that. She couldn't change the war, she couldn't change the countless deaths that built up around her, and worst of all, she couldn't change her role in it. No matter how many 'what ifs' or 'should haves' that circled around her mind when she tried to grasp the ever slippery slope of sleep.

This job was just another role to play. This was just another instance where in the eyes of a few she would be the villain, and in the eyes of others a hero. Unfortunately Harry knew the truth of herself fell in the greyer area. In real life there was no heroes or villains, just people. And that was the most terrifying fact of them all.

When you finally realized that it wasn't this mythically untouchable construct you had created in your mind that had done a certain thing, but a living breathing person. Humans, be it magical or muggle, were, or should be, on the darkest shade of creatures. There was no other creature or animal that created so much bloodshed, so much horror, than a human could and often did. And it was always over something so... Inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Sighing and scowling to herself, Harry reached over and slammed the lift button again. She was tired once again, even if night had only just started to fall on Hells Kitchen, and she refused to haul herself up the many flights of stairs if the lift was a viable option. She idly wondered if Jessica was home and would mind if she pilfered her Jack Daniels.

When no lift came, Harry grew fed up and repeatedly hit the button in hopes of the fifth, sixth or seventh time would work in opening the thick metal doors. Then just as the doors where opening, something stocky came barrelling into her side from the corner of the stairwell, knocking her a few feet to the side, but thankfully not making her sprawl out on the ground.

Looking up and to her side, Harry saw Jessica frantic and breathing heavily. She watched as the lift doors opened, and was shocked frozen to her spot. A blonde girl, maybe a year or two younger than Harry was standing in the middle of the lift, revolver clicking empty barrels at some bloody heap on the floor. Then, as if in a daze, something deep and familiar to Harry fogging over her eyes, she looked up and over to Jessica, a smile that didn't belong on her face, tainting it.

"Smile Jessica..."

Jessica stumbled backwards, hand clamping over her mouth as she shook so slightly, unnoticeable to the un-observant. Jessica turned away from the grizzly scene laid out before them and stumbled to a wall. Then the girl was screaming at the top of her lungs as she seemed to snap out of her daze, scrambling back to the corner of the lift as if to get as far away from the mass on the floor as possible. Harry reacted, jumping into the lift and over to the bodies.

A man and a woman, married by the looks of it, were bloody chested, numerous gun shot wounds to both. The man was partially laying over the woman, likely a last ditch effort to protect her from the gunfire, pooling blood seeping out around them in a maroon pool.

Harry skirted the blood and leant over to the man and woman, knowing by now it was pointless, but she still had to see. Checking the pulse of both victims, she found what she knew to be true. They were both dead.

Harry slowly edged back from the bodies, unsure of what to do in such a muggle situation when she noticed the blonde had stopped screaming and was staring dead-panned at her presumably murdered parents, muttering under her breath. It wasn't the blood that stalled Harry, wasn't the fact that it was likely the daughter or niece who had done this, it wasn't Jessica's reaction, it was the words the blonde was muttering that made her refreeze before she jolted over to the blonde, grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to look her in the eye.

"What did you just say? What did you say?!"

The blonde was twitching, her eyes glazed over in horror and a sort of resignation. Then, through cracked and pale lips, she spoke the words louder.

"He told me to do it. I did it. He told me to do it. I did it."

The blondes eyes started drifting back to her parents dead bodies, but Harry couldn't let that happen, she needed more. She needed to know that she was right, that this wasn't just a coincidence. So she spoke louder than she should have, shaking the blonde by the shoulders.

"Who? Who told you to do this?!"

Then the horror shining in her eyes was gone, replaced with a void of nothingness and Harry's insides clenched at the look. She had seen that expression before, in the bowels of Malfoy manor, when the prisoners were too far broken to be brought back to their former self.

"The man with the English accent."

Harry pulled away from the blonde like she had burned her, stumbling away from her. The Veela... The Veela had did this? Fleur was right, he was too far gone. He... He had made a girl shoot her own family? For what reason? Then the blondes earlier words sank in and Harry found herself slowly turning to Jessica who was leant against a glossed but yellowing wall. There was a crowd now, gathering people like flies to an un-attended dessert. But that didn't stop the two brunettes from making eye contact. Without much control, Harry's feet carried her over to a hunched over Jessica, and once her feet had come to a stop only a few inches away, Harry's tongue was in movement.

"You know who did this."

Jessica pushed herself up and off the wall, the iron that Harry knew that ran in Jessica's veins became solid as she stood up tall. A humourless laugh creeping out of her. Harry had never been given such a look before, one that just shouted of plain hatred, for the blonde, for the situation, for Harry and for herself. When she spoke, there was an ironic twist to her lips.

"And apparently so do you."

* * *

 **A.N** \- There we go, I know there wasn't much from the actual show playing out, but this chapter was needed for some ground work to be laid out. Next chapter we get into the actual plot and the nitty gritty!

I just wanted to let you readers know that while I am messing around with the whole Veela trope, this will be nothing like other Veela stories. The Veela's I've written and are writing about are a lot more darker, in this there will be no love attached to the creature. No love at first sight like a lot of other Veela stories. But I do need this for the upcoming plot to be able to play out properly. So please don't expect lovey dovey stuff or fluff, it wont come for a long time, if at all. Kilgrave is just not a character you can attach that label to and still make it seem like Kilgrave. And trust me, Kilgrave will be Kilgrave in this story, as much as I am able to keep him in character anyway.

As for those who reviewed, followed or favourited, THANK YOU! I really am happy that some people seem to actually enjoy the madness that my mind conjures up sometimes. And I hope you guys will enjoy the following Chapters.

As always, please drop a review, they make my day! :)


	3. AKA: Harry, Zarri, Rhetta

The one thing that nearly everyone over looked about Harriet Potter, be them muggle or Wizard kind, was her skill in hiding. Be it hiding things from people, hiding people from other people or keeping secrets. In a way if she was a Veela that would have been her calling. What she most excelled in within concealing, was hiding herself.

It was easy for her, to use the image of her that other people had constructed around her to hide behind. Her own personal veil to use as camouflage when she needed to. The wizarding world pictured her as the hero, the person who smiled through nearly every obstacle thrown her way, the one you could count on to be standing at the end of it. In truth, it was nothing but war paint for her to use.

What they didn't know, what they refused to see was she was no hero, she was simply thrown into circumstances where her only option was to play that part. If they looked close enough, if they took the time out from their lavish lives to look closer at her smile, they would see a painting. Flaky, cracked and fake. If they paid attention, they would know she wasn't standing afterwards, her knees simply refused to fold under the weight that pushed her down harder than gravity ever could. It wasn't some otherworldly force of will that kept her standing, it was she simply didn't know how to fold, how to do anything other than grin and bare it.

She had learned it from a young age. From the moment of her very first memory, she had to learn to put up with things she couldn't change, things she wanted to but were forced to endure. The Dursley's were never the best family, if you could call them that in the beginning anyway. She lost count of the times she was pulled out of class by a well meaning teacher inquiring about the latest bruise or cut. She would always do the same act, she would smile and blame her clumsiness. They bought it because Harry was good at going unnoticed. If she ever crossed peoples minds, it wasn't long before she was forgotten.

That was how she survived in those first fragile years of her life, by going unseen. If she went as unnoticed as possible in the Dursley's house hold, she would get less punishment, less scars to count. She would get more time away from her crammed claustrophobic cupboard that was nothing more than a small closet in reality.

Of course the time came when people knew about what she went through at the hands of her 'relatives'. Nothing was ever done about it, no, because it never fit in with their schemes and plots for her. Dumbledore, the Merlin classed war hero was no perfect man. Not like many of her kind pictured him to be, a saint sent down to protect them. Harry knew he knew about her treatment at the Dursley's hands, about her being a Horcrux from her second year, about her darkest secrets she never wanted the light of day to shine on. Did he do anything about it? He didn't, it didn't fit in with his plan.

He needed her so emotional disconnected, so affection starved that by the end of the war, when the time called for it, when she would have to give up her measly and dreary life, she would because of the minuscule scraps of love she was fed by the few people who cared, but never enough to do anything about her situation. It was for the greater good she would be told. Always the greater good.

Take the Weasley's for prime example. That one year, when Fred and George had come to rescue her in the flying car, they had gotten home and told Molly and Arthur everything they had seen. The twins told them about the bars on her window, the weeks old food on her table, the amount of locks bolted onto her 'bedrooms' door. They had even begged for their parents to let Harry stay with them.

The Weasley's knew about her home life, at least to some extent and yet again they did nothing about it but turn a blind eye. They said they loved her, but surely if you truly loved someone, a lonesome child, you wouldn't let them go back to that every summer and Christmas? You wouldn't simply pretend it didn't exist because it helped you sleep at night? But they did, and that was the year Harry realized the only person she could ever fully believe in, rely on was herself. Don't get her wrong, she loved the Weasley's, she owed them a lot, but with them when the going got tough, they got going. Ron ditching them in that forest only drove that point home all the more for Harry.

The war was not a walk in the park, not for any of them. Harry was just one of the countless young lives affected by the adults who had used them. Neville was one of the worst. In the beginning Harry didn't know what was wrong with him, what she could do to help. Then the little signs started cropping up. His lack and total refusal of sleep. The amount of times Harry had gone around to his flat, only to find him passed out with empty bottles of Fire whiskey littering around him like a shard glass halo. When something green flashed, he would loose it. It was like he switched back into battle mode, as if the people around him were the resurrected deatheaters that plagued his mind in slumber. Harry had once caught him whispering to himself, Alice, Frank, Augusta. His family members that had died in the wars.

PTSD was not excepted in the wizarding world. It wasn't diagnosed, it wasn't given treatment to and it sure as hell didn't exist in their minds. The wizarding society, especially from the old pureblooded families, was a dog eat dog world. If Neville wasn't of 'sound mind' then some obscure second removed cousin would come along and take control of his estates, would drain him dry of his families money. Thankfully Neville had gotten help before any of that could happen. Harry had managed to talk him around to seeing a muggle therapist, who was quick to diagnose the obvious case and send him for hasty treatment. Harry was good at helping others, not so much herself though.

In her darkest days, when she just wanted to give in, to never have to get up again, to never pull that mask on once more, she hated everyone. She loathed them with a burning passion. Ron, Hermione, the Weasley's, Fleur, Neville, Luna, Remus, Dumbledore. The list was endless. And in the blackest moments of those darkest days, she hated her parents. They left her to this life, to this existence.

They should have told someone, anyone about Pettigrew being their secret keeper. They shouldn't have been so arrogant about prodding Voldemort. They should have... They should have done something that meant they could still be there with her. Then they could have been there when she needed them most. Then they could simply hold her when the emotions, fears and tears clawed and clogged up her throat and made it hard for her to breath. Instead they were cold and dead in the ground and she was alone.

Even her godfather, her Sirius, who she loved more than anyone was gone. Gone because of others foolish choices, gone for his own choices, gone because she had made the wrong choice. No matter what other people told her, what she told herself to make herself feel better, his death was squarely on her shoulders. She shouldn't have gone after Author Weasley. She should have known it was a trap. The sting she felt when she thought of Sirius was the least she deserved for that idiotic choice. She would pay so much more in blood if only to have him back.

Even that, the guilt that ate her from the inside out, she was good at hiding. She carried on because that was all she knew how to do. She built an armour up around her. She had survived a war as a child, she survived Voldemort, she could survive herself. The question that was plaguing her at the moment was what was Jessica's war? Who was her own personal Voldemort?

Sitting down on the ground, knees pulled up to her chest loosely just outside of Jessica Jones's door, she kept asking herself that question. Jessica was at the police station at the moment, their impromptu confrontation having been put on hold by the men in blue when they arrived in a flurry of walkie talkies and flashing police lights. It wasn't long before one sidled up to Jessica demanding that she come down to the station to answer some questions.

Apparently the woman who had shot her parents, a Hope Shlottman according to the police man Harry had cornered after Jessica had been hauled to the police station, was a former client of Jessica Jones. Well her parents had been. The girl had gone missing and the worried parents had asked Jessica to find her. Jessica being the last person to see all three alive, the last person to talk to Hope was obviously needed to clear some things up. Like how the girl had gotten a hold on an unregistered gun and exactly why she had shot her parents.

The police would find no answers. Harry knew this because it wasn't a simple unstable woman they were dealing with, though they would likely pin this down to just that. No, what they were truly dealing with was the reason Harry was in America in the first place. The Veela.

While Jessica was busy being haggled by men with shiny badges, Harry had time to think, to join the dots. If Harry was moronic enough to believe that none of this tied back to the Veela before, she had gained some brain cells since then. It had to be, there was too many coincidences for it not to be.

First you had Arielle, who had been in contact with the Veela on her way through Hells Kitchen. Hope was found in Hells kitchen. Jessica Jones lived in Hells kitchen. So Harry knew this Veela was in this town somewhere, but she didn't think that was the main factor here. It all linked back to Jessica. Hells kitchen was were she lived, and although Hope was found in Hells Kitchen, she was no resident, she came from Nebraska.

Hope had said Jessica's name, and although she could have known Jessica's name from meeting her before she left in the lift, the look in her eyes spoke of something else to Harry. That look, the fogged over eyes that said there was no one home. But if you peeped past the fog, you could see the shadow lurking behind it. So while the person may not be in their head space, that didn't mean no one was home.

Harry had the unfortunate privilege of seeing an Imperiused person up close and personal, she could never forget Krum's eyes in that twilight maze of death in the Triwizard tournament. It was seared into her brain. And while in a lesser degree, the look was almost identical in Hopes eyes when she had stared at Jessica, telling her to smile.

She was under the affects of the Veela then, so why did she say Jessica's name? The only explanation was this man knew Jessica, and in turn Jessica knew him by her reaction to Hopes actions and Harry's own words. He knew her enough to play mind games with her. The irony of Hopes name wasn't lost on Harry, he had given Jessica hope only to take it away. That was personal, beyond personal. Harry knew Jessica wasn't a witch, apart from her total lack of magical signature, not even a wisp of magic coming off from her, the woman hadn't recognized Harry for who or what she was, which she would have done if she was a witch. That meant Jessica wasn't the Veela's mate.

Fleur had told her, had given Harry the answers she needed before she even knew she needed them. Fleur told her this man would get obsessed over someone. Jessica was the unfortunate would-be-link. The person he had locked onto in a futile attempt at connecting to. Jessica was the tie holding the puzzle together, the missing piece. To get to the Veela, Harry had to get Jessica to open up, to allow her in or at least around her until he acted.

Harry's main concern was what she could do if that happened. The Veela couldn't know she was trailing him, he couldn't know about her involvement full stop. She couldn't face this Veela head on, if she slipped, one word, one sentence and she would be under his calling too. Look at the chaos he had caused with muggle people, what the hell could he do with one of her kind under thumb? She wasn't sure of the lengths but she knew Hells kitchen would burn to the ground and Jessica would be dead... Or worse.

If Harry couldn't face him outright, then she too had to stick to the shadows. At least until the time came for her to jump out, to catch him by surprise before he could utter a single syllable. To do that she needed Jessica's help. She needed to know what he was like, what he was capable of, what he would do when pushed into a corner. She needed someone to shield her from his sight. If she was right about all this, then Jessica too needed someone watching out for her because this man would come for her soon, he had to. He didn't seem the patient kind.

He already knew about Harry's kind, already knew what they were capable of. Even if the trifling knowledge was only apparition, he still knew something. Everything he knew about was something he could factor in, something Harry couldn't use for a trump card. Harry knew this man was dangerous, he had to be for what he made Hope do to her parents. So Harry had to keep in the shadows for now.

A scuffling at the end of the hallway made Harry's head snap up to the direction of the sound, putting a temporary stop to her hurricane of thoughts. Jessica Jones was standing a few feet in front of her, face carefully built into a blank slate. Placing her hand on the door behind her, the hole where the glass should be now covered by large chunks of cardboard duck taped over, Harry pulled herself up straight, staring straight at Jessica. The woman gave her the same courtesy, never letting her eyes leave Harry's for a second, not even as Harry stood. Bracing herself, one thought ran through Harry's mind... _Showtime_.

* * *

"How did I know you would be waiting for me?"

Harry knew not to answer, Jessica's tone was literally dripping with sarcasm from the rhetorical question. However, as Jessica came storming towards her, shoulders back in agitation, Harry didn't budge from her spot standing in front of Jessica's door, blocking Jessica from getting through and into her apartment.

"Because we both know what is really going on."

Jessica tried to skirt around Harry's left flank, but Harry shot her hand out, palm slamming onto the wall in front of Jessica, arm blocking Jessica from getting any further. The older woman's lips pierced together momentarily showing how angry she really was, but then it was gone in a flash and Jessica was simply staring at Harry and vice versa.

"No, you think you know but you don't have a fucking clue. Take it from me snow white, no matter how much you think you know, it won't ever be enough to get involved in this. Turn around and back off from this while you still can."

Under normal circumstances, Harry would have taken that for a threat. However, from the underlying hint of worry pinching at Jessica's words and the storm raging in her eyes, Harry knew it was more of a warning. A get out of jail free card.

Momentarily distracted, Harry did nothing as Jessica pushed passed her arm, slammed her door open and marched into her apartment. Jessica's hand had just clamped onto the wood of the door to push it shut behind her in Harry's face when Harry spoke, she needed Jessica's attention and she needed to keep it.

"I know more than you think, more than I should to turn my back on this! I know what he can do! How he can say anything... Anything at all and no matter how much you fight it, how much you refuse to do it, you'll do it anyway. I know his end game is you and he wont stop until either you are by his side or one of you are missing a heartbeat."

Throughout her speech, Harry could see Jessica's posture grow more and more tense until it resembled a statue. Then, after a few breathes had left Harry's chest, Jessica slowly turned around to face her, only her shoulders and head turning. Jessica's eyes were flashing dangerously, her hand coming away from the door and clenching with the other hand into fists at her side. Harry swallowed, but At least she had her attention now, despite it looking like it would lead to a fist zooming for her face.

"You know him? Did he fucking send you too? No... You would have done something already. It doesn't matter. If you know that much, then you should already know that whatever you do is pointless! He wins every time. He came back from the fucking dead, there's no beating him. He isn't normal... He isn't human."

Jessica had stormed back over to Harry, almost getting in her face but not quite entering that invisible bubble. Harry took a glance around her, glad there was no security cameras. There was only one option Harry could see in taking, and she prayed it was the right one. There was only one way to stop Jessica from trying to protect her, because that was what she was doing. Jessica may be gruff, almost acidic and extremely rough around the edges, she may say harsh words, but underneath all that was a person who cares. Maybe even cared too much.

If after everything is laid bare for inspection, Jessica freaks out or tries anything funny, then Harry would just obliviate her. No one needed to know about the muggle who had come so close to the wizarding secret. Or more accurately, had seen it first hand. Stealing herself, Harry looked Jessica dead in the eye, and then apparated into her apartment.

"Well it's good thing I'm not exactly 'human' either."

Harry could see Jessica search the Hallway until Harry spoke up from behind her. Jessica swirled around, looking startled at seeing Harry standing in the middle of her office/living room when seconds prior she was in front of her. Then Jessica took heavy steps into the apartment, the sound of her boots clanking on bare flooring echoing around them.

"You can teleport?"

"Yes, but I can do a lot more than just that."

Harry needed to do this, she needed to put on a show. Jessica at this point in time saw her as weak. Or weaker than the Veela and herself, which meant she also saw her as someone in need of protection from the big bad. Harry needed her to see them as equals if Harry was going to get any further on this case, if they were going to end up working together on this.

So a show would be what she put on. Wandlessly and non-verbally, Harry shut the door of Jessica's apartment with a flick of her wrist. Turning to one of the foldable plastic chairs scooched up to Jessica's desk, Harry transfigured it into a plush leather armchair, flopping into the seat after it had transformed, kicking her legs up on the desk and crossing them over one another, her arms mimicking the movement of her legs.

"Just my luck. Just when I have enough on my plate some fucking magician pops up."

Harry had expected a marching band of reactions, from tears, to screams, to Jessica trying to murder her with a blunt object. Jessica's resigned huff of exasperation was not in the band Harry had imagined. Harry stumbled for a moment, correcting Jessica when in all reality it didn't matter.

"Witch. I'm a witch not a magician."

Jessica sent her a glare, one that told Harry she didn't give a flying fuck what she actually was. Then Harry was chuckling at the absurdity of it all, from being in America, to sitting in a muggle's living room and outing the big secret that had been dug into her since she was eleven to never let slip. Weirdly enough, Jessica must have found some amusement in the situation too as she joined in chuckling, running a hand through her hair.

"Witch then. Pointy hat, spells, curses, cauldrons, all that?"

"Surprisingly enough and as much as I hate stereotypes, you're pretty much spot on."

"Fucking hell. I need a drink if I'm going to be dealing with this shit."

The time for jokes and laughs was obviously over as Jessica strolled over to her desk draws, yanked the top drawer and pulled out a bottle of Vodka. Going over to a small chest of draws in the corner of the room, Jessica plucked up two tumblers, bringing them back over to the desk, popped the lid of the vodka, filled both glasses and slid one over to Harry. After a rather big sip from both Harry and Jessica, Jessica turned her gaze back onto Harry, something haunting the edges of her eyes.

"He... He didn't... You're not like Hope are you?"

Harry winced a little. She may not know what this guy did to people, apart from what he had done to Arielle, but it didn't take a second guess from him targeting women and what that could mean. Harry shook her head in the negative as she spoke.

"No. I haven't even met the Vee-... The man. I couldn't point him out from Adam. But he messed with one of my kind, it's my job to put a stop to that."

Jessica rolled her neck, easing the aching muscles and rubbing a sore spot where her neck met her shoulder. With her other hand, the one grasping the tumbler, she took an even deeper drink, nearly finishing it in one go.

"There's more of you? People like you who can do what you can do?"

"Thousands. Nothing compared to the muggle... The non magical population, but enough to create our own government that works in tandem with your own. This man, he's clocked on to our radar and well, we don't appreciate his kind of power. We have laws to abide, strict ones that keep us from doing crazy shit like this, this man has nothing to reign him in. The higher ups in my world don't exactly like that."

Jessica sighed and sank into her spinny desk chair, thumb rubbing over the glass of her tumbler as she thought things through.

"What if I say no? Because that's what you're getting at isn't it? A partnership in hunting... Him down?"

Harry nodded and took her own glug of her drink, the straight liquor burning its way down her throat, warming her from the inside out. Harry knew what it was like to be lied to, to have things hidden from you, to go into things blind. For Merlin sake she had come into this mess blind herself. If she could help it, prevent it, she wouldn't lie to Jessica. She would be as honest as she possibly could. Jessica deserved at least that.

"If you say no I'll have to take your memories. Erase you ever meeting me. If for some reason I can't, or you escape? More of my kind will come. Not only to find this man, but to kill you for knowing our secret if they even get a hint that you know. I'll loose my job and most likely end up in our biggest prison for letting you in on the truth. My world, my society isn't like yours. It's either get things done or you're done. I only told you the truth because I couldn't see any other way forward."

Jessica and Harry locked eyes, both deadly serious now all the facts were out there.

"Why do you want to catch Kil-... Him so much that you would risk all this? You know nothing about what he can do, what he will do to you. What are you? Nineteen, twenty? Even with all you're fancy tricks you wont be able to do Jack shit. Then I will have to pick up the pieces of what he leaves behind. You know nothing, you-"

Harry knew Jessica had slid back into defensive mode, knew she was just trying one last time to get her to turn back, but that didn't stop the tidal wave of emotion from crashing down on Harry. Harry was sick and tired of people telling her she didn't know, she couldn't understand. She knew better than most about the monsters that came from the dark, the ones you made for yourself.

"Because I do know alright! I know better then most what it's like to have a maniac whispering in your mind every god-damned second! I know what it's like to walk past a mirror and have to do a double take because you're not sure whether you saw yourself or him. I know what it's like to not know were he ends and you start. I know what it's like to jolt awake at night because you can swear black and blue that he was in the room with you, watching, waiting for you to slip, to become like him. I may not know this guy... this man. I may not have been stripped of my free will by him. But don't ever question me on whether I know anything or not. I know what it's like to have evil so close to you, inside of you that you feel forever tarnished. That despite everything you tell yourself in the dead of the night, he's still there with you. In your head."

Harry choked back on the spiel and emotions that had come pouring out from her. This was the first time she had ever told anyone of how she felt. She didn't feel any better for it, instead she felt like she was going to implode from the weight of her confession to a near on stranger of all people. Tears were misting her eyes, but even they were too stubborn to fall and during her rant she had jumped out of her seat, her nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms. Breathing heavily, Harry tried to gain back some of her composure, flexing her fingers to stop the stinging pain in her hands where her nails had dug in.

"If there's the tiniest possibility that I can stop that from happening to anyone else, anyone at all. You NEED to know I will sure as hell do whatever it takes to do it. So you are either with me, or not. It will not stop me."

Jessica was looking at her now with a new found glint in her eyes. Harry couldn't name it, maybe she didn't want to. When Jessica spoke, her voice was uncharacteristically quiet and even, no sarcasm in sight.

"What did you do to him? The guy you were talking about?"

Harry ran a tired hand down her face as she tried to fruitlessly push the vivid memories of the final battle back where they belonged, in the recess of her mind.

"I killed him."

Jessica tore her eyes away from Harry, took a drink but still only ended up looking into the clear liquid in her glass. The dregs now that the glass was nearly empty.

"Did it help?"

Harry chuckled, the noise missing any warmth or humour. The real question was did it stop the nightmares, the seemingly endless memories of Voldemort. That was what Jessica was really asking.

"Did it change what he had done? Did it stop the nightmares? Did it bring back anyone I had lost? No it didn't. Would I do it again even if I knew what was to follow? If I knew how little it would really fix? Yes. Yes I would."

Jessica's apartment was eerily quiet. Not a sound breaking the atmosphere that the two women had found themselves in, the noise from the outside world that slithered into the room from the open window was nothing but a quiet hum. Jessica was the one to break the tenseness that encased them.

"If we do this, it's done my way."

Harry nodded, she expected nothing more. As long as this Veela was dealt with and out of the way, then her job was done. Harry also refused to take this away from Jessica, this Veela was obviously her Voldemort, her own personal demon. Harry had no right in taking the vengeance, the justice away from Jessica. Harry knew she would have fractured, broken even further if someone had come in last second after everything she had been through and stole Voldemort's death from her. No matter the actual toll of his death took on her. It was her right, just as this ones was Jessica's.

"You're way. Partners then?"

"Partners."

In an uncanny synchronization, both Jessica and Harry lifted their tumblers to their lips and drank the last of their drinks. Tomorrow it was game on, and Harry had the feeling that even with both of them teamed up on this, the Veela would be one step ahead. Thankfully, he didn't have a clue Harry was involved at all, if he did, well, this was going to get bloody.

* * *

 _ **At a small** **café** **in Hells Kitchen. 7:40am.**_

Malcolm Ducasse hobbled down the quickly busying side-walk, arms rubbing warmth into one another despite the glowing sun up above him. A rectangular envelope, plain golden brown, was delicately placed in the crease of his crossed arms on the contradictory state of himself, unwashed, hair a mess, hoody holed and tatty, jeans not fairing any better. Unlike himself, he felt like he needed to look after the envelope, the pieces of paper that were safely housed in side. The man wouldn't like it if they were folded, if there was a single crease in sight. When the man wasn't happy, Malcolm wasn't happy and he wouldn't get his next fix.

Malcolm made sure to turn corners he didn't need to, made sure to walk in circles in some places, made sure to stop at places he didn't need to stop at. He did everything the man had asked him to, so when he came to the aluminium table with the well dressed man leaning back in a chair, Malcolm could finally sit down. His feet hurt, his bones felt like fragile glass and he wanted his next fix more than anything. With a trembling hand, Malcolm slid the paper over to the man who did not even bother to look at him, he was preoccupied by looking up and watching as the slithers of clouds passed through the clear blue sky.

When the man did take notice of Malcolm, he plucked the envelope out of Malcolm's hands, pulled out it's contents and fingered through them, a smile twisting at his lips. Malcolm turned away from him, itching the crease of his elbow joint. He didn't want to do this, but he needed to. He had to. Then the man stopped at a photo Malcolm had taken, frowning deeply at what was displayed on the page. Malcolm's heart skipped a beat, when the man wasn't happy, Malcolm couldn't be happy.

"This is not Jessica."

The man flicked the photo over for Malcolm to see, the shiny photography paper still stuck between his thumb and index finger. Malcolm went to take the photo from the man's grasp, but he pulled it out of his reach, amusement playing in his dark eyes. Malcolm hadn't meant for that photo to find its way into the envelope. To be truthful, he had taken it on a whim. His subject was unaware, just like a lot of his other photos but the moment had just been right and he had to take it.

The woman in the photo was just leaving her apartment building, Jessica was out of frame, but she was there in real life. His other photo's attested to that. The woman's hair was in a wild mane of long ebony curls, haphazardly being blown around her face by the breeze that was there that morning, creating a sort of halo in negative film. Her glasses, round and thin framed, were perched on a small and delicate nose. A scar in an odd shape splintered up from the top of her brow and onto her forehead. The frosty light of the early morning had painted her already pale skin, but rosy cheeks, into a reminiscent painting of freshly fallen snow. But it was her eyes, eyes that were looking slightly off to the side of the photo of her face and upper body clad in a plain white t-shirt, that had made Malcolm take the photo without a second thought.

They were so green, so vivid and so old for such a young face. It was startling. It was breathtaking. It was... Beautiful. At least from Malcolm's perspective. He had meant to scurry it away in his apartment, it was meant to be safe and sound in his depository box under his mattress. It wasn't meant to be in the man's hands.

"Now tell me Malcolm, honestly now, who is this?"

Malcolm reached up and scratched his neck with his sharp nails. He needed the fix, he needed it now. His thrumming blood felt like the ticking of a clock. When the man was happy, so would be Malcolm. So he told him what he knew. He had to.

"She's a friend of Jessica's I think. I've seen them around each other since she moved in next door to us. She's from England."

The man tutted, turned the picture back to face him and held it out, tilting his head from left to right as he took the photo in. Malcolm couldn't blame him, he had done much the same when he had first saw her. She was beautiful, undoubtedly so, but it was the age and the fire in her eyes that caught you off guard, that sucked you in.

"Now, now Malcolm. You know not to play games with me. Where else will you get your fix? Tell me who she is."

"Her names Harry Potter."

The man sent him a shark like grin that made his gut sink. The man kept the photo in his hands, but shoved the ones of Jessica back into the large envelope, folded the envelope and pushed it into the safety his suits inside pocket.

"Harry Potter you say? Unusual name for an Unusual woman. Well, you know what they say. A friend of Jessica's is a friend of mine. Bring me more photo's of this... Rhetta. I'm assuming Harry is short for Harriet or Harrietta, and well Harry is such a plain name. No, it doesn't suit her at all. Rhetta is much better. Be a good boy and bring me more photos of Jessica and this woman in the next two days. You know what to do. Well? What are you waiting for? Chop chop!"

Then the man was up standing tall, photo of Harry still clasped in his hand as he buttoned up his suit blazer with one hand. With one last gut churning grin sent Malcolm's way, the man threw a padded and thick envelope at Malcolm's chest, making Malcolm scramble for the goods that were inside.

By the time Malcolm had safely got the envelope in his tight hands and had looked up, the man in the purple suit was halfway down the side-walk, Malcolm could still see him staring at the photo of Harry as he disappeared into the crowd.

Malcolm didn't want to do this, he didn't want to need the next fix, he didn't want to do anything but go home. But he had to. When the man was happy, he would be happy. The man had told him such.

* * *

A.N: Well there is chapter three! That last bit was a spur of the moment decision. Kilgrave wasn't meant to make an appearance for a while yet, but well, Kilgrave made me do it. XD

I hope I got his character down right, especially seen as this is his first appearance in this fic. But I really couldn't help myself. I'm actually biting my nails to see if you guys liked it or not.

As for when they really meet, it will be a couple of chapters yet, two or three at the most. Most likely two, but there will be hints of him and I might (If people liked the ending segment) add in a few more of those.

As one reviewer asked, what am I going to do about David Tennant playing both Kilgrave and Barty Crouch Jr? Well to be honest, it will be addressed but it will no way impact the story. But it will be eventually brought up, most likely in a jokey way.

About Harry's rant, to be honest no matter the circumstances or how mentally strong someone is, going through what Harry did when she was growing up, when the brain itself is developing, it's going to leave a lasting mark and I wanted to make that clear in this chapter. Despite her upfront personality or her giving nature, Harry isn't as alright as many believe her to be. It's the one thing I didn't like about the Harry Potter books is how all these children, who had seen war first hand, who had a part to play in it, seemed to not have any repercussions from it when in reality they really would have. Especially Harry. As for why I chose Neville to be the one to have real issues pointed out in this chapter is because Neville was this close to actually being in Harry's spot in the books. It's only because of James and Lily's prodding of Voldemort that made him think Harry was the chosen one. And plus, I like Neville so I had to include him, even if it was only in passing.

Quick question, do you guys like the chapter length?

Once more a giant THANK YOU to all those who followed, favourited and the lovely ones who left a review. You guys are the reason I'm carrying on with this twisted tale. I hope you guys liked this chapter and the ones to come because things are really picking up pace now!

If you guys can spare a few minutes, please drop a review, it's the fuel to my writing!-AlwaysEatTheRude.


	4. AKA: On The Fence

Being partners with Jessica Jones was not exactly a 'partnership'. It ran along the lines of you do your thing and I'll do mine, if either of us get a sniff of Kilgrave or is in danger then shout really loud and hope the other will come running. It wasn't the best of circumstances Harry would admit, but it was something she could work with. Unfortunately the only solid info Harry had gotten out of Jessica's rather tightly sealed lips about the Veela was his name. Kilgrave.

On their actual progress in the big plan that wasn't really a plan, more of a directive of simply capturing Kilgrave, neither Jessica or Harry had gotten very far in the two weeks that followed. Nowhere in fact. If Harry had to give one thing to this Kilgrave, it was his ability to appear and then disappear as if he was never there to begin with. He was like a phantom, always lurking in the corner of your eye but as soon as you would turn your gaze that way, he would be gone in a poof of smoke. It frustrated Harry to no end.

The big hunt was also put on hold because of Jessica's determination to help Hope out of her, excuse the pun, hopeless situation. What Harry had originally believed to be a singular want of hunting down Kilgrave, something that aligned perfectly with Harry's job, Jessica had shown it was a two sided blade in reality. Not only did Jessica want Kilgrave to pay for his crimes, something Harry could understand, she also wanted to parade him around to free Hope, to validate her claims of 'Kilgrave made me do it'.

Harry was well on truly stuck on the fence about that tidbit. She was juggling a lot as it was, but the universe was also trying to throw in the very real possibility of outing magical creatures to the general public. In short? Jessica wanted to out Kilgrave in an act of trying to free Hope Shlottman. To out Kilgrave to the public would be to out a Veela. Magical creatures, such as Veela's, were so intertwined with the wizarding kind that if that came around, if muggle's got their hands on even one Veela, werewolf or any other menagerie of creatures that muggle's were blind to, Harry's kind would also be put in the spotlight.

Sure, the main focus of Harry's job was to protect those that needed to be protected, but there was also an undercurrent of well founded secrecy, for while protecting them Harry was also keeping them away from the muggle population, so it couldn't be traced back to the wizarding world. Jessica was trying to unfold all that she was meant to cover up in one fell swoop in the package of Kilgrave.

How long, if they got their hands on Kilgrave, would it be before they started doing experiments on him? How long before they spotted that there's something slightly off with his blood? His genetic makeup, something they have never seen before? How long before they start doing checks in hospitals, trying to prevent someone like Kilgrave, and saw more and more of these anomalies cropping up? How long before more and more creatures or half-blooded ones were outed and it eventually led to the wizarding folk Harry herself belonged to being found? Not long enough.

How had this seemingly easy mission of wrangling a wayward Veela turn into the very real possibility of her kind being shined a light on? The wizarding world wouldn't let it come to that, Hells Kitchen would burn to the ground before Harry's world could ever reach the light of day. Someone would pay the price for this, be it Hell's kitchen or any magical creature that would get outed by Kilgrave's finding. Standing in her shitty shower in her apartment, water raining down on her face as she looked up at the nozzle with her eyes closed, Harry realized she was at a cross roads.

She had given Jessica her word, she had promised to do things her way. But if in doing that Harry damned countless lives, could she live with herself? She had trouble enough with looking herself in the mirror as it was. It always came down to an impossible choice, Jessica, Hope and Harry's promise against the lives of the inhabitants of Hell's kitchen or the lives of the creatures her job had sworn to protect. If Harry looked at this in retrospect , in the matter of numbers, the scales were severely out balanced. Jessica, poor Hope and Harry were unfortunately on the very lesser side of the scales. Even knowing that, Harry still couldn't fully bring herself to take away Jessica's and Hopes justice, their freedom. Harry was stuck and she didn't know whether to turn left or right.

Scrubbing at her eyes, flicking the droplets of water away from them, Harry ran a hand through her hair, pushing the wet and heavy locks away from her face, stepped over the bath rim of her shower and bath tub combo and out of the shower, wrapping a threadbare towel around her. Stumbling to the sink with a fogged mirror above it, Harry blindly patted for her glasses before her fingers touched the cool metal and placed them on her face. Once she could see more clearly again, she plucked up her wand that was laying innocently on the corner of the sink and cast a quick drying spell.

She would normally let herself dry normally, drying spells actually made her already uncontrollable hair ten times worse, but she had no time to sit around and wait. She felt like she had done all too much of that since she had come to America. She needed to get out on the streets, she needed to find Kilgrave, she needed to do something, anything to get away from the shit storm that was her swirling thoughts and raging emotions.

Once fully dry, Harry pulled on a clean set of clothes. Nothing fancy, she never could stomach anything like that. Ever since a child, the only clothes she wore was Dudley's second hand me downs, even years down the line she only felt comfortable in a good t-shirt and jeans. So a white tank and a pair of light washed jeans was what she was going to wear that day.

Padding into her front room, Harry straightened out her glasses that had gotten skewed when she pulled her top on. She had only gotten a solid two hours sleep last night, three at a push. It may not seem much, but since the war Harry had only ever managed four or five at the most. She had trouble shutting her mind off, closing down trains of thoughts, that characteristic in her seemed to be extra aggravated when she tried to get some shut eye.

Glancing up at the loud ticking of the wonky clock on the kitchen wall as she entered, Harry decided she would leave out soon. It was only 6:00 am, but the more hours she had to go scavenging through Hells kitchen, with no sense of direction, added to her chances of actually stumbling across something useful. Harry chuckled at herself, if only her life was every that easy. Picking up the cup of coffee she had left on the side of counter, Harry downed the last cold dregs and dropped the cup into the sink.

Heading towards her door, Harry slipped her wand into her forearm holster, she pulled on a beige jumper she had left on the radiator to heat up before she had went for her shower, wrapped a thick knitted brown scarf around her neck and slipped her feet into some plain swede ankle boots. Browns, beiges, light blue. Blending colours, colours you wouldn't take notice of if you were walking past them in the street. People always believed you should wear black or dark blue to go by unnoticed. They couldn't be wrong, soft browns, mottled blues and greens were always the way to go if you wanted no one to pay you any attention. Darker colours, especially in the day time was something you looked at, that you took note of. Then Harry was out of her door, and with a jingle of keys, and the click of a lock turning, she was off down the hallway, armed and ready for the day ahead.

It was when she was turning the corner to head towards the stairwell when something caught the tip of her boot, nearly sending her flying face first to the floor. Luckily, she managed to latch on to the corner like a limpit and save herself some pride. Cautiously looking down and around the corner, Harry saw what her foot had hit.

A tatty and stained leg. Thankfully the leg was attached to a body that was slumped uncomfortably against the wall and spread out across the hallway floor. The man was quite young, maybe a few years older than Harry, but obviously didn't look after himself. If it wasn't his clothes that gave that away, it was his skin, his hair or the smell that rose up off him that pointed to that conclusion. Vomit, dirt and something else that made Harry want to scrunch her nose up and turn away from.

Harry kicked off and away from the wall, and subsequently the passed out man, and turned to carry on down the hall. It wasn't her problem. He was okay. He didn't need her help. He would wake up soon and head home, if his home was even in this apartment complex. She had things to do. She had Kilgrave to hunt down. So why was each resounding footstep that carried her further away from the man that much harder to make?

"Fucking bloody hell."

Regardless of her determination to carry on, Harry found herself turning back around to the man and storming over to him. Bending down on her haunches, Harry heaved the man away from the wall by his denim jacket's lapels. With some more then less graceful movements and a few near misses, Harry had his arm around her shoulders and was in the process of tugging and dragging the man to a standing position. Once they were both up on their feet, or at least upright in the case of the man, Harry had to lean on the wall to regain her balance and to shrug his weight more evenly distributed around her own smaller frame in any hope of dragging him anywhere.

With a bit of wrestling, Harry had him propped up against herself and the wall, taking her hand away from his waist, she reached up and harshly slapped the man in the face. Well, as hard as the angle would allow her to. The man came too with blinking unfocused eyes, blown out pupils and nonsensical words that were nothing more than one long noise joined together.

"Hey... Hey! Wake up! Where do you live?"

The man pushed off from the wall and nearly tripped under his unsteady feat, nearly taking Harry down with him if she hadn't have shoved him and herself back at the wall. His head lolled to the side, his pale tongue skirted out of his mouth and licked at his cracked lips and he finally uttered something Harry could make out and was useful. Looks like someone was actually looking down on her to day, even if it was in pity.

"237... Apartment... 237..."

His eyes were closing again and Harry knew the jig was up, it was unlikely she would get anything out of the either drunk or high as a kite man. Glimpsing up at the ceiling, Harry mentally asked Merlin to give her strength, and started to bustle, tug and drag the man to the apartment that was only a few doors down from her own.

By the time she made it to the door, Harry was slightly out of breath, but on some miracle, she managed to keep the man balanced and with a glance to his face to make sure he really was unconscious, Harry muttered a quiet alohomora, and shoulder his apartments door open.

The apartment was pitch black when she had hustled them both inside. Quickly, scared of the man falling and taking her down, Harry patted the wall next to the door, the same place her apartments light switch was. After the third pat, just as the man was tilting towards the right, the light came blazing to life as her palm hit the switch.

Blinking rapidly at the change in lighting, Harry scrambled for hold of the man again as she took a look around his apartment. A complete mess was the kindest thing her mind could come up with. It wasn't the lack of furniture, or the sheets used as curtains that made her think so. She had lived in a cupboard the first eleven years of her life, she was used to having little of anything. It was the tins of half eaten and spoiled food left on the floor, the piles and piles of dishes in his sink, the dirty clothing everywhere and the smell that made her think that.

Say what you liked about Harry's cupboard, her small room when she had one, her Gryffindor dormitory or Grimmauld place when she had gotten it from Sirius's will, once in her hands, they may be minimalist, but they were always spotless. It was the one thing Harry happily prided herself on, her cleanliness. Her need for a clean place was almost genetic in its intensity, it was as much a part of her as her black hair and green eyes.

This place... This place made her want to itch, made her eyes water and her fingers clench with the need to scourgify repeatedly or scrub away with a bucket, soap and those yellow gloves Aunt Petunia demanded Harry wore when she did the washing up, cooking up food, or touching anything that the other Dursley's had to touch. Aunt Petunia would tell her she didn't want Harry infecting Dudley with any of her odd diseases or simply herself. Merlin, she hated those bloody gloves.

Harry snapped out of her mind and unpleasant memories when the man groaned from her shoulder. Sighing, Harry glanced around her for a relatively litter free and clean zone she could place him. Spotting the mattress laid on the bare floor in the corner of the room, Harry dragged the man over and once close enough, half pushed and half lowered the man onto the stained mattress with a shove of her shoulder.

When the man was safely on the mattress, Harry brushed her hands off on her jeans and stood up from her crouched position, happy to get on with her day now that the man was in a relatively safe place.

However once she had fully stood, something poking out of the underside of the mattress, laying over her boot caught her eyes. Two envelopes, one bigger then the other were peeping out at her from their hidey hole. They must have become dislodged when the man was flopped onto his bed.

Normally Harry would have ignored it, it wasn't her envelopes, it wasn't her business. But her gut was shouting, practically screaming at her in blazing alarms. Harry's gut had saved her life more times then she could count. Dazedly, as if she didn't really know what she was doing, Harry had bent back down and pulled the two envelopes free. Standing yet again, now with the envelopes in hand, which she could see while the same colour they were in different sizes, Harry eyed the two wearily, apprehensively, something pulling her to look through them.

Cutting a glance to the man, frowning, Harry found her eyes drawn back to the envelopes quickly, that same dread now picking up pace in her veins. She didn't know why she was reacting so, they were innocent enough. For goodness sake, they were envelopes. But then she caught a whiff of something, so small of a smell that she couldn't name it but it made her adrenalin kick in full force, her heart pumping up in speed.

With nimble fingers, Harry ripped open the larger one and spilled it's contents onto the floor. She had learned in second year to never touch what wasn't yours, or rather Ginny's situation that year had taught her that.

Paper, white, crisp and pictured, fluttered to the floor in a mini torrent. Once they settled there, Harry's breath caught in her throat. Staring back at her, from the two dimensional world of photographs was Jessica... And herself. Dropping the other envelope to the floor beside her foot, Harry dropped down and flipped over the pages that had fallen photo side down and only grew more confused and equally parts worried.

There she was, and there was Jessica too, staring from each and every page. Them leaving the apartment, them together and even each of them alone. There was even one of that time Harry had ventured out into Hells kitchen to a local convenient store to grab a quick bite to eat. The neon sign of the store almost made her dark hair look so dark, that it was blue, her scar on her forehead incredibly prominent in that photo.

Harry fell down, falling onto her arse with a hushed thud, her knees bent and pulled to her chest as she ran a hand down her face, the limb stalling over her mouth, covering it. Staring at the man on the bed, Harry's mind whirled. Was this the Veela? Was this Kilgrave? Harry quickly shook that thought off. He lived in this apartment complex, Jessica would have ran into him at some point and then his game would be up. Harry may not know Kilgrave, but she was sure he was too smart to try and pull something as stupid as that off.

Was he a simple stalker? Did he have a thing for brunettes? Harry jostled in sudden realization as she snatched an arm out for the smaller envelope she had discarded earlier when the shock had hit her. Once it was in her grasp, Harry noticed it was already open and simply turned the envelope upside down, letting the contents pour out and slip onto her lap.

Little see-through baggies of crystalized powder landed on her lap, some sliding down her thigh and onto the floor. Drugs? That was not what she was expecting. There was something she was missing, something that wasn't clicking in her brain. This couldn't be as simple as a junkie stalker, it never was.

Then that tantalizing smell, one that made you want to scour for it, tickled her nose again, this time slightly stronger then before. Her eyes slowly made their way to the envelope clasped in her hand, and as if still not fully in control of her own actions, Harry lifted the thing up to her nose and took a deep huff of it.

Earl grey, polished wood, like that of a broomstick, and something else filled her nostrils. The other something brought a lot of things to mind, Lavender, grape, plums... That deadly poisonous plant monkshood. All of them converged on each other, blended, mixed until all Harry could picture was distorted purple. All she could see was a purple haze of smells.

With a harsh shake of her head, Harry tore the envelope away from her nose, despite herself wanting to do nothing like it. She had smelled that smell before, she had been pulled in like that before, back in her potions class. The whole student body had been when they had brewed the thing Harry had been smelling. Amortentia. There was amortentia on the envelope, or something that resembled the properties of amortentia.

Looking down at the photo's scattered around her, Harry knew without a doubt what this meant. This man, the unconscious one wasn't a stalker, wasn't a plain old run of the mill druggy. He had been around the Veela. It was Kilgrave's pheromones she was smelling. He must have kept that envelope close, most likely in the inside pocket of a coat or jacket, somewhere close to his skin for the smell to be so strong and effect her so. She hadn't been that effected by it back in class, not by a long shot and back then the potion had been shoved under her nose directly.

Easing herself up, Harry thudded over to the man. This was it. Kilgrave had an opening, something she could use to lead her to him. He had slipped. With a quick twist of her wrist, her long wand was slid out of her holster and in her hand and without a second thought, Harry sent a blue binding spell sailing towards the man. The spell hit him with a loud clank to the chest.

* * *

Harry sat in front of the man on the floor of his apartment, simply watching as he frantically tried to pull his limbs apart from the invisible bindings that restrained him, silent shouts being thrown out here and there. She had placed a silence charm on him, not needing some good Samaritan to come barging in before she could get what she needed from him. Calming herself down, Harry tried to settle the man.

"Hey, stop it... Stop that! I only want to ask a few questions okay? I wont hurt you, just no more shouting."

His jerky movements came to a slow stop, like a tap being turned off. Then his eyes locked on to hers, his eyebrows ascending high on his forehead as he finally took in exactly who was in his apartment with him. When Harry thought he was calm enough, as calm as anyone in his situation would or could be, Harry lifted the silencing charm off from him.

"Now tell me where Kilgrave is."

"No! No! No! No! Can't tell anyone! He'll know! He'll know!"

Harry had to jerk forward to grab a hold of the man as he turned his face to the wall and started cracking his head against it. Even bound, he was doing a good job of turning his lights out and it took a few moments for Harry to wrestle the bigger man away from trying to off himself. Really, she should have known this would be the reaction she got. The Veela, Kilgrave was smart, it would be unlikely he would forget to order someone to not let the beans out of the can.

"Okay! Hey, calm down! You don't have to tell me! You don't! Just calm down... That's right... Deep breathes... You don't have to tell me anything okay? You aren't going against anything he's told you to do. What's your name?"

The man was shaking on his mattress as he took big gulps of air into his lungs. Harry felt bad for setting him off, it wasn't his fault he was under some Veela's juju and it was a rookie mistake to make, one she should have known better then to fall into. The man swallowed loudly when he had calmed somewhat, and when he spoke his voice was croaky, raspy and broken in some places.

"Malcolm. My name's Malcolm."

"Good. Good, see? No one's in danger here okay? Just carry on breathing, everything is going to be fine, okay."

His shaking shoulders relaxed to a slight tremor of the muscle. His pupils contracted slightly and Harry knew that he had been going through a panic attack. One she had set off in him. Harry grimaced at herself. She needed to be more careful with her words and her opening statements. Mindlessly her eyes wondered to the pile of photographs at her feet, reflecting her frustration and anger at everything back at her from the glossy pages.

It was pointless, her whole stay in the shadows until the time was right plan, it was all for naught now. How had Kilgrave gotten to know about her? Or did she still have a chance? Harry shook her head at her naive thoughts. This didn't seem like the first time of photographs being taken of them. If she was only just now being photographed, there wouldn't be photo's of herself were she was alone, Jessica no where in sight or near her at the time.

Kilgrave was focused, obsessed with Jessica, he had most likely gotten a photograph of her with Jessica, and seen as she and Jessica were spotted together he would want to know more about the people who hung around Jessica, as leverage or a pawn to use if the time called for it. Fuck. She needed answers but Malcolm couldn't say fuck all... He couldn't say it, but that didn't mean he couldn't think it. Harry almost sent a prayer of thanks up to professor Snape for those torturous lesson's in occlumency and legilimency. Of course she couldn't hold up against the pro's like Voldemort or Snape, but with a muggle mind she should be able to get the answers she needed if she got Malcolm thinking instead of speaking.

"Listen to me Malcolm, this is important. You don't have to tell me anything, nothing will come spilling out of your lips, but can you think of the answers for me? When I ask a question think the answer to them loud and clear okay?"

Harry was as tense as stone she waited, either he would flip out again or not. When she got a confused nod from Malcolm, Harry nearly laughed in relief. Kilgrave had obviously told him not to speak to anyone about this, but he obviously never told Malcolm he couldn't think of it. Kilgrave had slipped on his wording too. This also gave Harry a taste of the extent of his power. It was all in the perspective of the individual Kilgrave's calling was influencing.

If he gave the same order to two people, they could follow it in totally different ways because they had to think about it and act it out. They would think of how he wanted it to be followed through. For example, if he told two people to rob a store, one could simply go in and steal something redundant like a packet of crisps while the other would hold the whole store up with a gun, maybe even going as far as killing the store clerk. It was how the people perceived him, how they saw him. If they saw him as this all powerful big bad that was a blood thirsty monster, then they would likely act out the latter rather then the former to please his orders and in turn the man himself. His calling relied on how people saw him. His commands, his calling had loopholes. Ones Harry was determined to use to her advantage in this dog fight.

Another strike against Kilgrave and another tick for Harry. Harry edged closer to Malcolm, making sure to look deeply into his eyes, with a swish of her wand, she muttered Legilimans.

"Loud and clear remember, as if you're speaking it in your mind. Have you gave Kilgrave photo's of me before these ones?"

 _"Yes."_

Shit. Kilgrave knew her face, knew what she looked like. If she hadn't have ran into Malcolm, if she hadn't have found the photo's, she would have carried out her plan and he would have seen her coming. damn it, if she gets close enough to get to him, he'll spot her and it will be game over. Kilgrave has not only changed the game without her notice, he's bloody flipped the board on its head.

"How long have you been giving photo's of me over to Kilgrave?"

 _"Two weeks. We meet up every two days."_

Seven instances. Seven times Malcolm has handed photo's of her over to Kilgrave. Merlin knows how many photo's he's handed over with Jessica as the subject. Kilgrave has had multiple photo's of herself seven times, what are the chances he wouldn't recognize her face on the street? Nil. However she had to do something. She couldn't turn her back now. Then Harry clocked on to what he had said. Every two days. Could something be actually going her way?

"When's the next time you're going to meet him?"

 _"Today... In an hour's time."_

During his thought, Malcolm cut a glance to his clock, the feeling that went along with his thought made Harry feel the echoes of his franticness, he's need. The only problem with this was she couldn't wear her own face to this meeting, it would spook Kilgrave and he would insistently dig himself deeper underground. She was a damn witch, one who had exactly what she needed in for this half hashed plan in her suitcase, in a box she stored emergency potions she may need to use in situations like the one she suddenly found herself mixed up would she get a chance like this again? She also couldn't let Malcolm carry on doing this, not only to keep Jessica and herself out of Kilgrave's eye line, but because of the obvious toll it was taking on him.

"This is the most important question Malcolm, I really need you to focus on this one okay? Try and picture the place you're meeting him. Try and picture the route you will have to take to get there. Imagine yourself walking that route to the place, step by step, don't miss a single thing out."

The images that came to her were blurry, but in focus just enough for Harry to make sense of it. She saw Malcolm walking out of the apartment complex, walking down streets, taking notes of the roads names that were on blue rectangular signs in blue and white. She saw him taking turns, walking around, she saw him go into a crowded park, the name of the park in proud letters above a wrought iron gate. She saw him heading towards a water fountain with small metal tables that were painted rustic white. She saw the back of a blurry man, much less in focus then anything else, sitting there and finally she saw Malcolm make his way over and sit down. The images cut off just as the man would have turned, but that didn't change what Harry knew. That man, that fuzzy mass of dusky maroon, black and brown was Kilgrave.

Harry breathed in deeply through her nose, trying to ease the stinging at her temple that came from over use of Legilimency. Harry had the place, she had the time, now all she needed was the mask to wear.

Turning to her side Harry scooped the photo's up and slipped them into the abandoned envelope they belonged to. She couldn't exactly turn up to this meeting without the promised goods could she? And if this played out the way she wanted it to, and she managed to wing this, then Kilgrave would have no use of them by the end of the day. Once they were safely away, Harry turned to face Malcolm, guilt churning in her gut for what she had to do next.

"Can you let me go now?"

"I'm sorry Malcolm. I really am."

Malcolm had a moment to look alarmed before Harry flicked her wand at him and cast the obliviate that would insure she still had her cover and also had the time to take his place in this little get together between him and Kilgrave. She didn't want to mess around with people's memories, but she also didn't want to do a lot of things in her life, it just seemed to go that way sometimes. Well, more often then not actually.

Once Malcolm had slumped down into his mattress from the spell hitting him head on, Harry cast a quick stupefy before he could regain his bearings and re-ask her what she was doing in his apartment. Finally, when Harry was sure Malcolm was unconscious, she undid the binding charm. He would be passed out for the next few hours, five at the most. By his dark circles and under eye bags, he needed the sleep as much as she did.

Just one more thing and then she could be on her way. With the envelope of photographs safely trapped between her bicep and ribs, Harry bent over Malcolm and with a quick slicing hex, took a rather large chunk of hair away from the rest of the nest of tangles and knots.

Storming out of Malcolm's apartment, Harry scanned the hallway to make sure it was clear. When she found it was, she shut Malcolm's door and made her way to her own apartment. She was running on a time limit here, it would take at least half hour to forty five minutes to get to the park Malcolm had pictured. Harry didn't believe Kilgrave would wait for her, or be happy at having to wait. Best she not piss him off before she could jump him.

Entering her apartment again, Harry knew this plan was risky, full of holes that could be torn bigger at any given moment by Kilgrave's words or actions. But she had to act now, she wouldn't get another chance like this. She had been in Hell's kitchen for two and a half weeks, and this was the only time she had come anywhere close to where Kilgrave would be. She needed to take it. She just hoped he wouldn't command her to do something that her mind would take as magical prompt and apparate her somewhere.

Walking into her apartment and closing the door, Harry accio'd her potions case and took it to the kitchen counter. Pulling the lid off, Harry searched for the little bottle she was after, dropping the ones she didn't need back into the dark depths they belonged in.

Harry knew she should call Jessica, should At least try and get word to her about where Kilgrave would be, but Harry didn't. Not only was Harry unsure of where giving Kilgrave over to Jessica would lead for the magical community, she didn't want to get the woman's hopes up for nothing. Plus, Jessica would demand to come and while Harry may be well hid due to her magical abilities, Jessica wouldn't be and there's a snow balls chance in hell that Kilgrave wouldn't recognize Jessica. No, she would call Jessica once she actually had the bastard.

Picking up another bottle, Harry nearly put it back before she realized it was the one she wanted. Holding it up and closer to her face, Harry took in the thick, gloopy dingy green potion. Just to make sure, Harry flipped over the little parchment label tied around the neck of the bottle, near the glass ball stopper, with a green ribbon. Harry read the words elegantly written in swirling lettering in black ink on the yellowing parchment. Placing the photo's down on the kitchen counter, Harry popped the stopper of the potion bottle and held the hair from Malcolm over the bottle, ready to drop it in and give it a thorough shake for good measure. She wasn't looking forward to the taste.

Polyjuice Potion tasted vile.

* * *

 **A.N** \- To answer some questions put forward by the lovely reviewers, I've added your names to make it easier to reply but if you don't want your names added to the A.N next time if you ask a question, just pop me a P.M and I won't do it again. It's just easier to answer questions this way then individually messaging everyone, and if some people who hasn't reviewed has the same question then they get their answers too.

 **First Lady Lestat** \- No, seeing her photo hasn't linked them, but it has tweaked him a little. He's intrigued like you said, but it's more of a pull, to do with his Veela nature, of wanting to find out who this is, if that makes sense? I hope that cleared things up a little :)

 **Love and Whimsy** \- Am I going to right a softer side to Kilgrave? Hell yes. In my eyes Kilgrave is the epitome of a duel personality. He's monstrous, he has no morals, no boundaries, but on the flip side I really think it is all down to his need for 'love'. The problem with Kilgrave is he doesn't know what love is, he hasn't seen it, even from his own parents. The reasoning behind me warning people about this story being dark is because it is, it involves Kilgrave after all, but there will be moments, a lot later on, when a softer side of him shines through. Although then, even as these times pop up, he will still be Kilgrave and have his moments. I agree with how you see Kilgrave. The way I see him is as child who has never had the chance to grow a moral compass, the experiments he went through as a child, whether to save his life or not, was very damaging on him. It took his control away from him, it stripped him of his own choices. I think that is why he is as bad as he is as a grown up, why he wants to control everything and has no qualms about doing it which ever way he sees fit, no matter how bad that extreme way is. At the end of the day, I think Kilgrave really just wants someone who can see through him, who he wont need to be controlled to have by his side, like he tries to do with Jessica with the whole buying her childhood home thing and refusing to give her commands for the day it lasted. As much as people want to see him as this inhuman character that does reprehensible things, which he does do, he is still one of the most human characters ever written I believe. Kilgrave is complex, extremely so, and I'm trying my best to keep to that and to make this relationship, when it does get to there, as complex as Kilgrave and Harry are as characters. As for his potential for good, well... You will have to see what I have coming up in the latter part of this story ;) P.S- your reviews make my day, really they do, and push me to right a better story, so thank you for bringing these things up and have me questioning this story and its direction too!

 **Skendo** \- I'm glad I'm not the only one who liked Malcolm and felt sorry for him. I really wanted to push through the actually mental problems he faces due to Kilgrave because while the show does show it, the main focus is on Jessica because it's Jessica's show.

to all those who reviewed, favourited and followed, Thank you all so much. If I could I would send you all a purple suit. You people are lovely, honestly!

 **NEXT CHAPTER** \- Harry catches her first Glimpse of Kilgrave...


	5. AKA: The City That Never Sleeps

Potion's was a tricky subject to pin down at the best of times, it was a even trickier skill to use in the open field, to master the knowledge of which potion out of the hundreds of thousands that existed that you should use for that one situation. Many potion's could be used even if you didn't have a drop of magic to your name, unfortunately Polyjuice was among the minority that you did need magic to use.

To change ones appearance as well as Polyjuice did, it had to latch onto your magical core and pilfer magic continuously to keep it running. It only took small amounts of course, so minute that the witch or wizard under its influence wouldn't feel a drain on their magic at all during the two hour duration a good dose of Polyjuice took to wear off fully.

However, like a lot of things in life Harry had found, it also had a downside to its use. One blaring flaw. One change in your magical core, one dip, rise or fluctuation in its strength, or more importantly its structure, the Polyjuice would be rendered useless and you would be, according to the few accounts of just this happening, have an extremely painful experience of having the Polyjuice ripped off from you and your true visage to come out and play.

It was a survival mechanism. If you went into heavy battle, or were heading into an equally matched duel, or your core took a brutal blow of some kind, an irreversible change in its input or out-put, your magical core would start prioritizing its capabilities. Like a muggle fighting severe cold temperatures to live, their organs would begin to shut down one by one, the lesser needed ones going first. In magical folk the same rule applied and if you were one of the unlucky ones to be using Polyjuice in a situation like that, it would be the first thing shut down.

Why do you think no one in the wizarding wars, pick any of the many that had happened, used Polyjuice as a reliable alternative? It was incredibly useful for infiltrating the opposing side, which Harry herself had done when she had broken into Gringotts and the Slytherin common room. It protected your identity, protected the identity of your loved ones. The risk was just too great when compared to other potions or spells that could do the same thing to a much lesser extent, but have none of the back lashes that could come from their use. Only desperate people, herself included, would turn to it.

If Harry knew of the trouble she would be getting herself in, the tornado twirling above her head ready to drop at a moments notice, because of her choice in using the Polyjuice potion while dealing with Kilgrave, the path that choice irrevocably plunked her on, Harry would have turned tail and ran for England, damn the consequences and the ocean splitting the two countries apart.

She didn't know though, she had no clue and so with a dash of arrogance on her part, she followed through with her half baked plan that should have never been fully thought of in the first place. That was Harry's biggest mistake. When handling Kilgrave, nothing would ever be straight forward or as easy as she would think it was.

There was always a price to pay for mistakes. The price for Harry's? Her pound of flesh took the form of a sucker punch to her chest, her magic going haywire on her and confusion the likes she had never felt before. She was never going to make eye contact with a maniac again.

* * *

Trying on some ones skin was easy-peasy with a little help from mother magic. Trying to impersonate that person in a meeting that could end up with you either brainwashed or dead? Not so much.

By the first block Harry had walked down as Malcolm, she had managed to get his long strides and footing under control. By the second block Harry had managed to get his hunched posture down pat. By the end of the third block, Harry had managed to replicate the random jerks and twitches from withdrawal to near perfection. By the fourth block Harry had managed to get her eyes to sporadically dart around her surroundings, looking on edge without the whole act seeming over played. By the fifth and final block, just before she would need to veer of from the city line and head towards the park, she had whispered to herself the whole way down in hopes of mimicking Malcolm's voice. Some passers by had glanced at her like she was crazy, but they soon turned back around once they saw Malcolm's drugged out face and it was hardly important what their opinions were.

It wasn't perfect, her vocal cords didn't quite go so low but she could work with it. Push come to shove, her slightly higher pitched voice could be easily explained away as her, or more accurately Malcolm's, lack of drugs in his system.

Even with the Malcolm 'armour' she had encased herself in, Harry was anxious as she came to the wrought iron gate stuck between high, lush green hedges on either side. This was the place she had seen in Malcolm's fuzzy drugged out mind. The same gate, the same hedges, the same name twirled and arched over the gate. This was it, somewhere in there, through this normal looking gate was a not so normal man. Kilgrave.

The apprehension she was feeling was the kind that buzzed around you, through you. It made your blood feel thicker or your veins tighter, it made your tongue heavy, your senses sharper, goose bumps and the hairs on the back of your neck to hackle up. Harry had felt this feeling once before, many moons ago, when she had taken her lonely walk to meet Voldemort in that clearing in the forbidden forest. Where she had gone to die at his hands, with no loved ones by her side to wish her well or mourn her like only a family could.

No loved ones that were left in the breathing world to bury her carcass at the end, or to simply hold her hand in her last few seconds of her tumultuous life. This type of feeling, the feeling of being boxed into a corner was hefty. It didn't bode well for this meeting or her chances of seeing it through.

In all fairness, Harry had every right to feel that way. She would have been an imbecile not to. Kilgrave was a man who could tell you something, anything, and you would follow that command through without a single other thought in your brain to put up a fight against it. Brushing her hand across her right forearm, were her wand was safely hidden from view under her transfigured clothing that matched Malcolm's outfit she had seen earlier, Harry had to wonder if she could cast a Silencio in time. Could Kilgrave talk faster than Harry could duel? The answer wasn't clear cut and that's what spiked Harry's angst, made that squeaky voice in her mind yelling at her to go back to gain volume.

The other troubling worry Harry was facing was being able to get Kilgrave away from the public. Through the thick black bars of the iron gate Harry could see the bustling and lively park. Commuters heading towards the entrance to the subway that was just outside the parks boundaries, office workers drinking steaming coffee in a rush to clamber to their nine-to-five jobs in time, mothers and children on a day out, feeding the birds and playing little games of chase or catch.

The park was packed, even this early on in the day, there was no chance of Harry being able to pull off a clean extraction of Kilgrave with so many potential eye witness's watching. Harry thought that was likely why Kilgrave had chose a place like this. She needed to think fast, the hour was nearly upon her and she had to think of a way to get Kilgrave out of his sanctuary the crowd around him would offer. He was smart, too smart for Harry's own sense of comfort.

Harry had originally believed this to be an in and out job. Fast, productive and easy. She wouldn't need to get too close, she would use Malcolm's face to not arouse suspicion in Kilgrave, allowing her to get just close enough, hand him the photo's and while he was distracted, send a Petrificus-Totalus or Stupefy his way. Once he was down and out, she could drag him to a dark corner of the park and apparate them both away to finish the job in a better and cleaner setting, one that didn't offer the option of outing herself to a crowd of muggle's.

With the amount of people giggling, talking, strolling around, it was unlikely some muggle, or ten, wouldn't see the bright flash up close to know it wasn't something that could be written off and see her dragging off some poor bloke into the shadows to do Merlin knows what to the fellow. She would be arrested before she could bloody blink, and no one would question who Kilgrave was, just that she had attacked him. Harry cursed under her breath, New York really was the city that never slept.

Okay, all was not lost. She couldn't turn back now, not when she was this close to closing this final chapter. She could adapt the plan, tweak some things. That was what her gruelling years in Auror training had taught her. Adapt, accommodate things out of your control and always be on your toes. Do what you must to get the job done, sooner is always better then later. Later gave the suspect time to commit a crime again, for the body count to rise.

Apparently there was more than a soft humanoid shape that linked the wizarding world to that of its cousin, the muggle world. Impatience. Harry being a true blooded Gryffindor, a Potter and... Well Harry had no hope in the patience department. Patience was not one of her virtues, and she didn't have many of those to go by either. Virtues were elusive traits, ones people like her couldn't indulge themselves in.

Edging to her right, Harry let the humongous hedge engulf her out of sight of the park inhabitants. She needed five to calm down, to screw her head on straight, to plan, to detach herself from the mission and over all get her shit together.

Somewhere along the long events of her apparating to America and this damn hedge, she had gotten in too deep. It had become personal. Why else was she so ready to follow through with an obviously faulty plan? Why had she outed herself to a muggle woman, even if Jessica had taken it quite well, so readily?

Be it Hope, Jessica, or even her own personal knowledge of knowing what it's like having your choices snatched away by people stronger than you, Harry had grown attached to this case. Her own emotions and feelings were muddying the already murky waters she was trying to navigate in a dinghy of all things. She couldn't be attached. Not right now. Not when she had to think on her feet and meet Kilgrave face to face. Her personal shit could come later, when she could afford for it to. In the dead of the night when the rest of her messed up life haunted her.

Harry steeled herself away, pulling herself into that hollow void she had housed inside her since she could remember. The same place she would mentally retreat to whether she was a toddler curled upon a small cot in the dusty Dursley's cupboard, or fighting for her life surrounded by deatheaters in the ministry. When she was sucked into that dark, empty abyss, she had no worries, no cares, no job, no name. Nothing. In that darkness she just simply and peacefully existed. Nothing more, nothing less.

With a new burst of determination and confidence, Harry pulled away from the high edge and slipped through the open iron gates in the body of Malcolm. One step at a time, and step one was to find Kilgrave in the mass of bodies in the park. To do that, she needed to find the water fountain, which if this park was anything like the ones back home in England, would be in the very centre of the park. Then if there was more than one person hovering around it or seated at a tables like the one she had seen in Malcolm's head, she would separate the odd man out, who would likely be Kilgrave. If all else failed, she would literally sniff the fucker out. She wasn't going to forget his smell for a long time. If ever.

As soon as Harry had gotten two feet within the park, she was in the thick of a crowd of roaming muggle's, her sense's overloaded by the people and the park itself. Her eyes took in the smiling and stern faces, the mixture's of blues, browns, grey and greens that were given a yellow hue due to the rising sun. Her nose was assaulted by multiple assailants, ranging from the small vendors pushing hot-dogs and waffles, the freshly mown grass so sharp it slightly stung the back of her nose and the airy but crisp perfume of a business ready dressed muggle woman with cropped dark hair that had just zoomed past her. The woman had sent her a glare from the corner of her eyes as she pulled her briefcase closer to her body. Two guesses what that woman's job was. Lawyer. Harry had seen the same 'holier than thou' face printed on the members of the Wizengamot.

All in all, Harry would have loved to have stayed and soaked it all in like a true tourist, but her life and the lives of others were balanced on the knifes edge and she had a job to finish. Exploring her Muggle roots, her long passed mothers heritage would have to be put on hold. Squeezing and sliding her way through, thankful for Malcolm's taller height than her own five foot four, Harry made sure to keep her Malcolm act up and make her way to the middle of the park.

Using the chance while she had it, the bodies around her hiding her movements from the neck down, Harry double and triple checked her wands placement and ease of access, checked to see if it peeked out anywhere, and then made sure she had the blasted photographs of her and Jessica tucked away in the denim jacket. As much as her stomach rebelled at the idea to do so, now that she had to actually talk to Kilgrave to hopefully lead him to a secluded and shady corner of the park, she would have to actually hand them over and let him search through them fully instead of the quick glance her original plan had expected.

When marble and sprouts of trickling and glistening water peeped out between the heads of passers by, Harry knew it was game on. Shimmying her way through the people barricading her away from the fountain, Harry stopped stumbling when her feet hit smooth pavement slabs.

The fountain was pretty in its simplicity, silver coins glinting in the large circular marble base that held the mass of water, the ripples from the sprouts distorting their image, making it look like the base was made out of silver. Around the fountain was a whole running pathway that snaked around it and split off in four directions, north, east, south and west. Tall evergreen trees were standing proudly from the plush green ground. Picnic tables, just as Malcolm's mind had conjured up, were dotted around the vicinity of the fountain, and four benches made out of iron and red wood were stationed at the four corners the path made.

There was one couple, newly engaged by the looks of their sparkling wedding bands on their ring fingers, were seated at one of the picnic tables, eating and feeding each other croissants. Two elderly gentlemen in woolly jumpers and farmer hats were playing a game of chess at another table, grumbling at each other, tutting and eyeing the board cunningly.

The only other occupied table stood directly in front of her, it was taken by a lone man. For some reason, Harry knew without a shadow of a doubt that this man, this muggle extra to a nice park set of a film, even if she could only see the back of his head and the top of his shoulders from her vantage point, was him. This was Kilgrave.

Harry shoved her large hands that were several skin tones darker than her real ones, deep into her coat pockets. With one last steadying breath, she hunched her shoulders and shuffled around and towards Kilgrave with fumbling footsteps. As she circled around and inched closer to him, Harry tried to take in as much of him without prematurely alerting him to her presence. He was tall, even when he was sitting. From what she could tell, he had a swimmers build, quick line and fast. He was dressed sharply, as if ready for a executive business meeting at the drop of a hat. Shiny Italian leather shoes that were polished to glint, dark pressed slacks, a dark wool coat that must have cost more than Harry had ever brought herself in her entire life combined and a dusky purple scarf wrapped around his neck.

The last item of clothing caught her gaze longer than its predecessors, the colour being only a few shades off from the purple haze his smell from the envelope had slammed into her mind an hour ago. Flicking her gaze upwards, Harry took in his facial features. He had stubble on his cheeks and jaw, his longer fringe coiffed outwards from his face. He was sat on a chair pushed up to the picnic table, one arm draped across the back of it as he stared out at the crowds roaming past, watching.

He started to turn towards her as she crept forward, to look at her dead on but before he could Harry flickered her gaze down to her scruffy trainers, Malcolm's scruffy trainers. Not once, apart from where Harry had forced Malcolm to look at her with Legilimens, did Malcolm willingly make eye contact with her. If she was going to make it out of this with her sanity and free will in check, she didn't just need to look like Malcolm. She needed to be Malcolm.

Wasting no more time in fruitless thoughts or schemes, Harry staggered forward towards Kilgrave and the picnic table and proceeded to plonk herself in the vacant seat opposite of Kilgrave, keeping her eyes on the ground, the table, the passers by. Anything and everything but Kilgrave.

"Hand it over then. I don't have all day."

Kilgrave's voice was smoother then she had expected, the blatant English accent a welcoming familiarity from home. It lulled you into a false sense of security. Harry found herself delving her hand into her jacket's inner pocket reflexively, only to stall as her fingers grazed paper and her entire being froze in place. She didn't feel that crushing need, the one she had expected to feel. She didn't feel the want to follow Kilgrave's command, the impulse to do anything he told her to do. His calling didn't work on her...

"What are you waiting for junkie? I said hand it over!"

Harry scrambled for the envelope and once the thick wad was in her grasp, she flung it onto the table between her and Kilgrave. Not because she HAD to do it, his calling didn't suddenly begin to work on her, but because she couldn't for the life of her think of anything else to do. Plus, she didn't want to give her cover away before they had even began did she? If she froze like that again, Kilgrave would clock on that something major was fucked up about this whole thing.

While Kilgrave plucked up the envelope, peeled the end open and scanned the contents with a huff of 'Good boy', Harry tried to frantically grasp every titbit of information Fleur had spoon fed her in what felt like a lifetime ago. She couldn't be... Harry wasn't Kilgrave's ma-... No. That was impossible. She would have felt someone else's magic being jammed into her core and she had felt nothing like that. Maybe her being a... Ex-Horcrux cancelled Kilgrave's calling out. Maybe she just had a naturally immunity to it like some witch's and wizards had a naturally immunity to the lethal and 98% fatality rate disease that was dragon pox. That was more likely, and without being linked to Kilgrave and still having the pass on his power, this had upped her chances.

"I like this one, get me more like it next time. She's a pretty little thing isn't she?"

Harry jerked out of her thoughts and glanced at the blank back of the picture Kilgrave was holding up and staring appreciatively at. She refused to look the bastard in the eye. Harry answered croakily, trying to find and say the right words she thought someone like Malcolm would say. She just needed to keep her act up a bit longer.

"Jessica? Yeah she is."

Kilgrave sighed in what sounded like a cross between disappointment and anger, turned the photo around for Harry to look at and rolled his neck as if the mere presence of Harry, actually Malcolm, aggravated him to no end.

"Not Jessica you idiot! Little Rhetta."

Harry wouldn't have had a clue who this 'Rhetta' person Kilgrave was talking about if he hadn't had shown her the photo he was looking at, and the facts weren't staring at her blatantly in the face, mockingly. The same photo from earlier was being flashed right back at her, with the harsh neon lighting, the wind blown hair that was so dark that night it looked blue. He was talking about her. She was Rhetta. Harry had to re-grapple for her words, the revelation sending her off kilter. Harry had to cough into a closed fist after her first word that came out of her lips were high pitched, even for her normal voice.

"She's... She's alright."

Kilgrave scoffed at her non-committal answer, and from her peripheral vision she could see could see his lips curl up in disgust. He slipped a long fingered hand into his coats pocket and pulled out a small rectangular envelope, the exact resemblance of the one back in Malcolm's apartment. With a flick of his arm, he flung it onto the table, the envelope skidded to her end, nearly falling off in the process.

"Go on, take it and leave. You bore me."

Harry took her chance and snatched the smaller envelope up. She didn't need to talk Kilgrave into going to a dark corner, it was unlikely he would follow. Now she knew his calling didn't work on her, she could simply pretend to leave and follow the bastard at a safe distance. He had to pass an alley way at some point, this was Hells Kitchen.

Harry had just crammed the drugs into her denim pocket and braced her hands on the picnic table's edge to hoist herself up when Kilgrave stopped her movements, leaving her stuck halfway standing and halfway sitting.

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

Then, with one sentence, four mundane words laced together, Harry made a fatal mistake. She would later blame Kilgrave's way of abruptness, but that didn't change what happened on that sunny morning in Hell's kitchen, what she did and what she felt because of it.

Harry's eye's locked onto Kilgrave's tauntingly dark ones. Before the slam of emotion and magic solidly landed a hit on her sternum, Harry remembered what exactly Fleur had told her, she could here the French floral accent in the base of her skull regurgitating the words as if Fleur was in her head.

 _"Once eye contact is made, there's no going back."_

The air in Harry's lungs gushed out of her lungs in a loud whoosh, her knee's folded underneath her, leaving her clutching at the table with white knuckles, the only option of keeping herself upright, even though right in that moment she didn't know which way was up and which was down. Harry was tumbling down a rabbit hole head first. She felt like something had viciously torn a part of her core out and quickly replaced it with something alien, foreign, something heady and... Squirming. It felt... Revitalizingly powerful in a strange way.

From her misty eyes, Harry could see and faintly register Kilgrave grasping at his head, the same paleness to his knuckles that mirrored Harry's. His face was screwed up in some form of emotion that Harry, in her dazed and painful state, couldn't name.

Then blinding pain came crashing over Harry like a tidal wave in reverse. It felt like someone had grabbed the skin of her chest, twisted, and proceeded to yank Malcolm's visage from her torturously slow. She was shaking as her short hair turned into her long ebony locks that went tumbling and fluttering down her back, she grew smaller, curvier,paler and her clothes morphed back into the outfit she wore that morning before she had transfigured them to match Malcolm's attire.

An echoing bang rattled the table and caused Harry to jolt into a standing position, ready for a fight despite the arguments her aching muscles and bones pleaded to her. Kilgrave. In her pain she had forgotten he was even there, that she was anywhere at all, let alone had people around her. He had stopped cradling his head, slammed his fists onto the table and started to shout, anger blazing on his face.

"What the hell have you done to me Junkie?! Go smash your face into that marble fountain repeatedly until-..."

Then he saw and finally recognized who was really standing in front of him, in the exact spot Malcolm used to be. And against all odds, everything Harry had expected, he laughed lustrously, the laughter had a whiff of madness to it. Slowly he stood, as if a predator readying to ponce on the injured prey.

"Well, well, well. You're a special woman aren't you Rhetta..."

Then Harry's pain was gone, her weariness, her confusion, all emotions replaced with just one that burnt hotter than the sun. Anger. Undiluted rage. With a flick of her wrist, Harry's wand was in her hand and pointed at him and Harry was ready to put Kilgrave, this man, this Veela permanently to sleep in a city that never does.

* * *

 **A.N** \- There goes chapter five! There isn't much to talk about this chapter, but thing's (obviously) go AU from here on out. So don't expect too much cannon to come through, although there will be some parts kept the same as the show.

 **IMPORTANT!** : Question, I know about my promised Matt Murdock/Hermione fic, don't worry if you're waiting for it, I'm just smoothing out the plot and then it should be out soon. HOWEVER, I've just finished watching the new season of daredevil and like a lot of other viewers, I have quickly fallen in love with the character Frank Castle (The Punisher). So here is my question, seen as I'm having so much fun in writing a fem Harry story, would you guys like to see a Fem Harry/Frank Castle fic?

In fact and to be perfectly honest with you guys, I've fallen down the Marvel TV show vortex and for the life of me I can't get out. XD And seen as I really enjoy writing Fem!Harry, I'm going to set up a (Yes another one) Poll on my Fanfiction. net homepage. I'm going to put up a list of pairings with Fem!Harry I'm willing and happy to write about.

So if you lovely readers could either pop over there and vote, REMEMBER you can choose three choices, that would be fantastic. If you guy's don't want to vote in the poll, can you leave it in a review, or if that isn't your cup of tea then even drop me a P.M and at the end, I'll leave the poll up for a week, so around the 1st of April it will close, I'll tally up all the votes from the poll, the reviews and the P.M's.

IF you really want a pairing and I haven't added them into the poll, or their in the Marvel movie universe, then either leave it in a P.M or a review and I'll really consider it. For those who don't want to vote in the poll, here are the choices, remember pick THREE because those top three will be the one's I will write.

Frank (daredevil)/Harry

Wesley (Daredevil)/Harry

Luke Cage (Jessica Jones)/ Harry

Foggy (Daredevil)/ Harry

Nobu (Daredevil)/ Harry

Matt (Daredevil)/ Harry

If you're even up for prompts or tropes to go along with the story, such as this story is obviously the Veela trope, then give it a drop in a P.M or a review, and I'll give it my best shot.

Thank you all to those who have reviewed, followed and favourited. I couldn't ask for better readers! (Who else would read this, let alone put up with my madness?)

As always, thank you all for your wonderful words of encouragement, keep classy, and please review! - AlwaysEatTheRude21


	6. AKA: Moon Man

**HARRY'S P.O.V**

It was never going to be easy, Harriet Potter would be a fool thinking it would be. Still, as the Bombarda left her mouth, as the magic trailed from the pit of her stomach to the tail of her wand and out, that glimmer of foolish hope that it could be that easy burned bright and hot. She only had a few seconds to enjoy that sentiment, watching avidly as the flash of colour burst to life, zooming through the air and hitting Kilgrave right in the sternum. Then that hope died, crumpled and shriveled as her own feet lifted off the floor just as his did, as she too went sailing through the air, limbs askew before her back met gravel and mud in an almighty bang and flair of sizzling pain, never mind not having a spell cast at her.

" _When one gets a paper cut, the other will also, in the exact same place…"_

Bubbling pain erupted from the cavity of her chest, radiating out in sharp spikes and jolts, in the same spot she had hit Kilgrave in. Harry groaned as she flopped to her front, just knowing she had a broken rib or two. Apparently, it wasn't going to be just paper cuts they shared, but all the hurts and owies. Shitty-death, that meant Harry couldn't hit him with any spells, not if she didn't want the effects to befall herself too, which made the whole 'being a witch' thing pretty redundant in the first place.

Heaving herself up to a shaky squat, one leg bent awkwardly, her muscles stubbornly spasming when she tried to stand. Fuck, she had put way too much power behind that Bombarda and now she was reaping the benefits. Before she could try and stand once more, Kilgrave's voice echoed out from the great yonder, lost somewhere over the fountain.

"Sangria!"

Harry had no time to wonder what the fuck the maniac was talking about before reality hit her squarely in the jaw like a back-kick from a kangaroo. A code word. The newly engaged couple who had been dithering around each other and the elderly gentlemen pair lost in a game of chess froze before they stood in sync, all walking over to a quickly recuperating Kilgrave with blank, porcelain faces. It was unnatural, all fake and burnt plastic, their movements. No wonder they hadn't reacted to Harry's transformation or hers and Kilgrave's brief stint at being airborne… They had been under his power all along. As they lined up like little toy soldiers on the battlefront, they reached into their coats, their purse, their trousers and pulled out guns, the hammers clicking home ringing in Harry's ears as they all pointed the nozzles to their temples.

A set up. Trap. She had walked right into his spindly hand and had not the idea or intelligence to notice his fingers wrapping around her, squeezing. She was a Merlin damned idiot. Kilgrave had made a bloody fail safe and Harry had failed to see it. Of course he had, he had lived this long out of the long reach of the law, flying under her kinds radar, being tracked and hunted. He likely had contingency plans for his bloody bathroom breaks.

Even so, Harry wasn't down and out, not quite yet and if anything, she would make sure to give the sneaky bastard a run for his money. After all, she had stolen a prized stone, found a room lost for centuries, was an accomplice in a convicts escape, ran illegal classes right under the nose of a ministry official, fought as a child through a war, broke into the most secure bank in the world and left on the back of a dragon, deceived, cheated and finally killed a meglomaniac… She too had a deceptive, cunning streak a mile wide. It's time she put it to use.

Managing to stand finally, Chest still shaking and burning from the pain emanating from her ribs, Harry angled her body just so from Kilgrave and his line of meat shields, delving her hand into her back pocket and plucking out her phone. Blindly, she began to scroll through her contacts, or what she hoped was her contacts and not her picture gallery, hoping being hope that she clicked the right one when she pressed dial. The vibration from her phone let her at least know she was ringing somebody.

"Whatever it was you just threw at me, try a round two and these people will let their grey matter flutter into the wind with a bang and splat. Now Rhetta… Come here."

One heartbeat. Two. Three. Four. Five. Harry smirked at Kilgrave, where he came to stop just at the side of the fountain, his little fail safes trailing him, a dark, insidious little chuckle bubbling up and out her constricting throat. From her stance a few feet away from him, she could see the downward twitch of a lip, a tightening of a tendon in his jaw.

"I'm going to have to say hell no."

He scrambled then, not physically, he didn't seem the type to display such behaviour, but she could definitely picture the cogs in his mind grinding and smoking at the monkey wrench she just threw into them. He really couldn't comprehend that his power didn't work on her, not when he bit out through clenched teeth gnarled words and she could see his hands ball into fists as he tried to casually stand, shoving the limbs into the pockets of his coat to hide his frustration.

"I told you to come here!"

Harry sidestepped a few times, making sure to keep her front to him and her phone at her back, rubbing the salt into the wound as she showed him she could move, just not towards him… And that was her choice. She couldn't help it, not really, she could be an antagonistic little shit when the mood struck, and this was an opportunity to show this rotten thing that for once, he wasn't in control. Her gaze slid to the little lambs he was using… Well, not fully in control.

"Would you just look at that, your power doesn't work on me. Does it upset you? Make you angry? Do you feel like crying? I'm not one of your little toys Veela, your puppet strings won't latch themselves onto me."

His façade of casual indifference did fracture then, his lip curling into an ugly twisted snarl, all promise of vicious bite and keen words. No doubt Harry's own sharp smirk spoke of dark and ugly promises. He must have felt the walls closing in on his back right then, encapsulating him, cornering him. Harry knew that feeling all too well. However, that glint of challenge, glee and something fiery that took home in his eyes unsettled her. Deeply so. It spoke of games about to be played, cards hidden up sleeves, a new challenge to try and climb. Still, he cocked his head and eyed her.

"Veela? Can't say I've heard that swear before. Rolls off the tongue though, like many things can."

The innuendo was lost on her, especially when the truth of him began to become clear in her mind. He… He didn't know what he was. Now it was Harry's turn to blink like a fawn soaking in the sunlight for the first time. Subconsciously, she took a single step closer, only noticing such when he took one backward. Had he always been by himself then? How had he survived this long without knowing what he was? Was that even possible? What did he think he was if he did not know? To grow up, doing the things they could, never knowing… Harry physically snarled and growled as she adamantly stomped and battered down an emotion beginning to make itself present in her chest. No. She did not feel any sympathy. Not to a man like Kilgrave. Still, her inner questions birthed themselves against her will in the air that was hanging heavy between them.

"You don't know what you are, do you? You've never known? Just how lonely have you been?"

It was the wrong thing to say, especially the last part as his nose crinkled and a glint of fang pressed into his lip ever so slightly as anger took a hold of him. She heard the beep from her phone, a signal to get her head back in the game, just loud enough to alert her that the person she had rung had finally picked up. Mentally, she sent her thanks up to the clouds and to the people she was sure were still looking down upon her, looking out for her.

To make sure this was heard, Harry stormed forward, stopping short of Kilgrave, giving him just enough space to know she wasn't about to attack, Merlin forbid he gave the word for the shots to start firing and he went through with using his meat shield because she slipped and became hasty, she didn't need any more blood on her hands, but close enough for his voice to carry to her phone, still pressed at her back. Thankfully, use his voice he did as he nearly yelled at her.

"It doesn't matter, I know what I'm capable of and that's all that matters. Perhaps I'll give you a second-hand demonstration of it. Would you like that Rhetta?"

Harry's heart picked up as she looked at the people holding their death in their own hands, so ready to pull the trigger on the word of a stranger. One wrong word, one wrong move and they'd be gone, dead. Perhaps the thought hurt her because she was selfish, she just didn't want anymore ghosts to haunt her soul and creep into her dreams through her tears. Perhaps it hurt because she felt a kinship with them, having to sacrifice yourself on some other's orders. Perhaps it hurt because somehow, someway, her magic fit with a man who was so willing to do this. What did that say about her? Nothing, if she didn't let it.

"You're right, it doesn't matter. None of this matters. This place, central park near the western fountain, will be where your sick little sadistic games die."

He didn't question her weird wording, Harry only hoped her voice had carried far enough to be picked up from the phone behind her back. Now she only had to stall him long enough and figure out a way to incapacitate him without herself. Shit, how do you hurt someone who was physically linked to your own wellbeing? What could she survive but he couldn't… No… The risk was too high, surely she couldn't, wouldn't? However, when he spoke up once more, that glint shining brighter then ever, pushing at Harry's own determination as if daring her to follow through, that little voice in the back of her head who always told her to do the outlandish thing picked up in volume, cementing the little demented plan that was taking form in her mind.

"You really have trouble listening, don't you? One more bright flash from that little wooden stick of yours aimed at me and these people are dead. You don't want that, do you Rhetta? Not when we could be such good friends."

She really shouldn't… But perhaps, if she did, she could finish this whole fiasco before it went further. After all, death was nothing new to Harry and if this went south and ended how it very well might end, she would only be solidifying what should have happened back in her nursery, back in that forbidden forest. She had always been living on borrowed time, she knew that, always had. Maybe the clock had finally struck midnight.

"And you have trouble understanding consequence's, don't you? You should have ran. You shouldn't have looked me in the eye, but you have and now we both have to deal with the repercussions. The thing is, I won't ever have to touch you, fire at you to finish this. No spell will be aimed at you and this is still the end of the line. The clock has ran out Kilgrave."

He growled, something other in the noise rattling Harry at the core, opening his mouth to say something when Jessica's voice rang out, clear, bright, like a beam of sunshine through thick, grey clouds.

"Harry! Run!"

Harry could see her storming through the crowd, hair billowing in the wind, a tall blonde man and woman following close behind her. Kilgrave glimpsed them at the same time, eyebrows raising high before shadows painted his face black with unadulterated rage. When he turned back to face her, he spotted the phone she was now holding up, Jessica's name flashing on the phone screen.

"Game over."

Harry smirked sadly as she lifted her wand. Kilgrave went to grab her, only managing to wrap his hand around hers to pull the wand away. When their skin touched, Harry felt his magic, his calling, flare into her in torrents and waves, lapping and skimming over the surface of her own, melding and dancing. The world span, her heartbeat wasn't alone, her thoughts not her own and something unseen but oppressively heavy jabbed itself through her chest, like a chain, tying her to something… Someone. Kilgrave. The channel opened and swallowed her whole. Everything she was, had been, will be, gone, eaten.

It was like he was inside of her, under her skin, it was like she was inside of him, here and there and everywhere. For that split moment, his thoughts were hers and hers were his, what she was seeing was what he was seeing, his heartbeat shadowed hers and there was no hope in distinguishing where one began and the other ended. Fuck, Fleur hadn't mentioned anything about skin contact… Then again, she likely believed, like Harry, that there was no chance of Harry being the mate, and therefore, the information being redundant.

She managed to hold onto just enough self-identity, her own thoughts and feelings, to pull her hand close to herself, his still holding on tight, as she pressed the tip to the soft underside of her jaw. The world blinkered around her, she was him, she was herself and she was also something new, something mixed and alive and breathing and real… And she fought, by Merlin did she fight to find herself once more as she dug the wand in deeper, eyes screwing shut as she tried to grasp the slippery tendrils of herself. She always finished what she had started, this would be no different. She only hoped she would survive, you know what they say, third times a charm and the moniker of master of death was always uneasily held upon her shoulders.

"I always preferred the colour green. Avada Kedavra!"

Then the world flashed emerald and just as Sirius had said so many years ago, it felt just like going to sleep.

* * *

She was a child again, thin, starving, bruised and left in the dark where forgotten and lost things went to rot. _Naughty Harry! Freak! Get in the cupboard!_ Her knuckles hurt from banging relentlessly on her door, voice hoarse and aching from her shouting. They wouldn't come. They wouldn't let her out. They never did.

"Please, Please! Let me out! I promise I'll be a good girl!"

Her six-year-old self sounded too old and too frail.

Suddenly, she was a boy, young too, in nothing but a hospital gown in a bleached out white room. _Be a good boy! Stop screaming! This is for your own good!_ She was jerking, fighting, snarling and yelling and yet she knew it wasn't her doing it, like she was a backseat driver in this body, a phantom at the back of the mind forced to watch and endure the horror show taking place. Still, she acted as if this was her body, this was her dream, her memory. In a way, in this weird world she found herself in, it was hers. Her pain. Her voice. Her darkness.

The people restraining her, his, their wrists and arms slammed them down on a metal table, cold and frigid, just like their inquisitive eyes when they 'studied' them, wrenching their hospital gown open. They had just enough time to jilt their head to the side to see the mammoth needle heading towards their bared spine. Somehow, someway she knew, just knew, they wouldn't listen, they never did.

"Please Mommy! Don't! I promise I'll be a good boy!"

His, her, their voice broke like it was made from glass.

She was herself again, eleven years old and curled up in Gryffindor's dormitory. Only, she wasn't just herself, she could feel another inside of her, acutely aware of the presence this time. A part of her. There, right in the back of her mind… No, not just her mind, everywhere, watching, waiting.

 _Fear of a name increases the fear of the thing itself_. That was what Hermione had said wasn't it? Yet, as she laid awake while all others slumbered soundly around her, no matter how many times she let the word slip through her lips and fog into the air, the word still held that same uneasy feeling that sank her gut and clogged her veins. After all, the name of an emotion wasn't a name at all, was it? It didn't have a name, didn't have a face to blame, only a feeling.

"Alone, alone, alone, alone…"

Drummed out to the pace of their heart beat and sleep did not come for them that night.

They were tied down to a hospital bed, wrists and ankles sore and red from chaffing, blood caking in some places. Something weighty and cold was clamped around the lower part of their face, tight and suffocating… _A muzzle, silencing their screams, their pleas, their words. they, the hospital staff, they were afraid of their words._

The thin cotton sheet did nothing to quell the chill or quaking in their bones. The room was empty sans them and the bed, only a little window in the far corner letting in any form of light. They spent most of their nights looking out that window, watching the moon and stars twinkle and dance. They were their friend, the moon and stars, their only friend and when they were here, they weren't so alone.

However, it was not so this night. This night the sky was bare, empty, bereft. Alone. They were alone and the feeling wasn't something they ever wanted to feel again, but they would, oh, they would. It came every night in this hellish place. Sleep did not come.

Harry loved the colour green. Deeply. Irrevocably. So much so for such a silly thing as a colour. _"Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign Harry, even in the wizarding world."_ They thought she was insane. Perhaps she was. Perhaps they were insane and she was the only sane one around. Perhaps she was Alice and they were all the red queen, come to stamp out her green roses and bleed them red. _We're all mad here._

However, she heard the voice, with its curling vowels and hissing consonants and she thought of the colour green. She thought of the snakes in the Dursley's backyard, her first and only friends for a majority of her life. For something so silly, Green had shaped much of her life and would continue to do so, for good and bad, and she could not part with the colour in fear she would part with some large chunk of herself. Her eyes, the spell that took her parents, the colour of the door handle of her cupboard, the colour of those snakes, the colour that came to mean both death and life to Harry. Soon, even despite being in Gryffindor, Harry began to wear green socks, or vests, or corded bracelets. _It made her feel safe._

They, however, loved the colour purple. It was the colour of the undershirt of one of the nurses, Freda. She gave him, her, them a smile sometimes. Gave them a bit of extra porridge and when the tests began once more, she would sometimes secretly hold their hand, or gently wipe their tears away before the others shoved them back into that vile room. It was the only form of human kindness, compassion and affection they had known for a long, long time. So long in fact, they couldn't remember a time out of the hospital, couldn't remember anything but this life. Perhaps there wasn't. ' _I can't go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then' Alice said._

Purple was also the colour of the sky in dusk, right before the moon and stars came out and he, they would no longer be alone in their dank, cramped, locked hospital room. Purple wasn't blue, like the hospital gown they were forced to wear and the surgeons taunting masks. It wasn't red and dark like the blood spilled. It wasn't as stark and hurtful as the white hospital rooms and operation lamps flashed into their face. Purple was not being alone. Purple was kindness. _Purple was safety._

Harry was herself again, running through the department of mysteries, but something was off. Weird. Wrong. She wasn't fifteen anymore. She was grown. She shouldn't be here, running… Again. However, she was always running, wasn't she? From the memories. From the ghosts. From the blood spilled threatening to drown her. So, she did what she did best. She ran, she ran and ran and ran until her muscles threatened to collapse.

Just as she turned a corner, scrambling to get away from the howling deatheaters, from the haunting of her own twisted mind, she bolted into a clearing that shouldn't be there. Nothing here was right. Nothing here was real. Or it was all too right. Too real. Too truthful. Harry couldn't tell anymore.

It looked like the forbidden forest, but inexplicably not. Her heart thudded in her chest as she eyed the place up, spotting another opening on the other side of the clearing. It looked like hospital hallways. A maze. A labyrinth. Just like the one she had escaped. Dank and grim and dark, so dark. Someone, very much like she had, came bolting down and into the clearing, falling short in the dewy grass at the change of scenery.

This wasn't a memory. It wasn't a dream. It was something… Other. Her legs started to move just as the other persons did, drawing them closer as if they had been negatively and positively charged. Magnets. North and south pole. Opposites, yet the same. She was only a few steps away when she got a good look at him in the dim light of the midnight forest. She knew those eyes, that sardonic twist of lips, that quaffed hair and yet, she couldn't put a name to it. She knew it as deeply as she knew herself somehow.

Right then, right there, he was made of moon dust. Stagnant. Cold. Alone in the sky with the only light being that which reflected off it from the sun. _Just how lonely have you been?_ He couldn't generate his own light, he lost that ability a long time ago. He couldn't make his own warmth, only ever knowing the cold, void space they both called home. He couldn't stop being alone, because when things got too close, they fell into his gravity well and burned up, scarring his surface. He had tried to make friends out of asteroids and had only destroyed them.

Right then, right there, she was made of star fire. Hot and bright and burning herself out. Too fast. Too giving. She would explode eventually. Stars were pretty to look at, but their light was cold, too far away to reach and when they went supernova, they ate everything that was in their path. However, sometimes, when the skies aligned just right, the moon and stars danced together, not alone, not cold. An empty void filled with sparkling light.

Giggling broke out in the frigid air and Harry could only watch as two little beings manifested themselves into the clearing. One was a little boy, hair shaved short, scars littering the scalp. He was barefoot and clad in only a hospital gown, little electrodes stuck at his temple. Only, he was made of thick, decadent purple smoke. He smiled all toothily, crooked but innocent, as he danced around the other one.

The other one, well, that one stalled her. It was all green lightning and crackling emerald fire… _You don't get smoke without a fire_ …And it was her, back in her seven-year-old body with knobbly knees, cropped curls, bruised skin and Dudley's too big and holey shirt. The boy picked up the girl's arm as they giggled and danced around each other, twirling and swirling and blurring into one mass until you couldn't tell where one began and the other ended.

Magic. That girl was her magic and that boy was the moon man's who was standing before her. Slowly turning to face him, Harry saw him raise his hand, placing it palm outwards and fingers extended. Yet again, Harry couldn't stop her own limb from mirroring the movement and just as skin brushed skin, the little dancing boy and girl exploded, swallowing them in a mushroom cloud of mauve and shamrock.

* * *

 **JESSICA'S P.O.V**

Harry was laid prone across Jessica's torn up couch. The woman had been out cold for the last twenty-four hours, her shallow breathing the only sign of life as she barely moved, twitched or groaned. Wherever her mind had wondered off too, it was far, far, far away from here and Jessica didn't know whether to be thankful for it or to curse the young woman. What the hell had she been thinking? Then again… What had Jessica been thinking?

Sitting at her desk, Jessica poured herself another shot… Or three of rum, downing it as soon as the liquor settled in the glass. Just as her glass smashed back down on wooden desk, Harry Jerked up into a sitting position, hand outreached and mumbling something about moons and green children. Jessica only sighed as she poured herself a full glass of rum. Harry took in the room around her, only settling when she recognized her surroundings, hand dropping as the other rubbed at her forehead harshly, eyes screwing tight as she swivelled to slump against the back of the couch.

"I'm guessing I survived from the amount of pain I'm currently in."

Jessica scoffed.

"Yeah, you're alive, but you look like shit."

When Harry stood, she was trembling, violently, as she hastily dashed for the stockpile of alcohol Jessica had on her side table, not bothering with a glass as she snapped the neck of a bottle of vodka clean off and began downing the entire thing like it was holy water. Jessica winced. Whatever went down between her and Kil-… Him before she had shown up had rattled Harry, enough for her to be trying to drown herself in thirty percent. Jessica wasn't sure she wanted to know what had transpired. But she would have to, especially if she wanted to help Hope Shlottman anytime soon.

However, silence still reigned supreme as Harry drank her fill before anger took over her form, Jessica watching as she lobbed the bottle at the far wall, glass and vodka raining down. She began swearing then, cursing and throwing, even using that… Magic of hers to send Jessica's table sailing and crumbling into the very same wall she had sent the Vodka to die on. After a lifetime, when the fire and coal inside Harry died down, she began to crash, sliding down a wall, legs cramped at her chest as her eyes glazed over, voice deadpan and contrary to her behaviour.

"What happened? Is the Veela… Is he dead?"

Jessica told her the truth. It was the only thing she could do.

"No. He was for a while… So where you, but you both came around to breathing eventually."

Jessica remembered the green flash, running over to their crumpled forms, finding no pulse or breath in site and dammit, for one horrid, vile moment, Jessica had been glad. He was dead and it was over and nothing else mattered. Hope didn't matter. Harry's own suicidal death hadn't. Jessica had hated herself then, for feeling such a way. But that hadn't stopped her from feeling it all the same. Nevertheless, as she, Trish and Simpson began to drag Kilgrave away, under the pretence of a hospital visit, it took a total of twenty minutes before he began to heave in a breath, Harry likely mimicking him at the exact same time. Everything from there had gone to shit. No, that wasn't truthful. It had all been complete shit since the beginning.

"Shit… Shit, shit, shit, fuck!"

Jessica shook her head as Harry violently turned and punched the wall, her voice spitting venom. For one split second, in a way, she had celebrated Harry's death because it had meant Kilgrave's demise too and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't meet the woman's eyes, couldn't look in her direction. What kind of fucked up piece of crap was she?

"You did your mojo and it didn't work. The real problem here is how you went solo after him. You took a shot with that green blast-y thing and it did jack shit."

Jessica was deflecting again, it's what she did best. She couldn't admit she felt partially responsible for this. She couldn't admit that she was disappointed it didn't work, even if it meant Harry's life in payment and she sure as hell couldn't admit her own part she played in this whole failure. But she had to.

"I didn't aim the spell at him, I aimed it at myself! It's the bloody killing curse, it kills anything it is thrown at!"

Jessica's hand stalled as it reached for her glass, her eyebrows drawing down tight and locking into place.

"I'm not following… You tried to off yourself? How was that supposed to stop him?"

Harry pushed off from the wall then, pacing between wall to wall, looking all the more like a trapped, injured animal. Perhaps she was.

"Because we're linked!"

Jessica dropped her glass back down, running a tired hand down her face as she swallowed the burning liquid. They were going in circles, never-ending.

"Start. From. The. Beginning."

Harry stopped her pacing, shooting Jessica a keenly sharp look. Jessica knew that look, had seen it on her clients all the time. She was debating on whether to tell her or not. Jessica couldn't blame her, if Harry hadn't have screwed up today, Jessica would have. All because both of them had decided that secrecy would lead to a more peaceful resolution, a resolution without death… And well, look how well that had turned out. Harry must have seen something in her face that made her sequester as she crossed her arms over her chest.

"Kilgrave… He's what is known as a muggle Veela. They need no wand but can still do… Unnatural things. They're notoriously unstable and emotionally volatile creatures. They always have a gimmick, a talent, we call it a calling. Us wizards and witches have a spell could Imperio, it practically makes us able to control another person, we say jump, they jump. Only, it's outlawed. Rightfully so. That's Kilgrave's calling. To have a creature with such a calling as a muggle Veela is highly danger-"

Jessica bit the inside of her lip until she tasted copper pennies, nausea tickling its way up her throat. Harry could, if she had wanted to, do what Kilgrave could do and the idea of more of Harry, more of the people capable of such a feat made her feet itchy, made her want to run. _Maybe she should have stayed dead…_ No. That wasn't Jessica speaking, that was the fear. She wouldn't let it control her, not any longer. Harry could have done it, but she hadn't, not once, and that spoke volumes. Jessica fell back into her default mode. Sarcasm.

"I know just how dangerous it is."

Harry winced, looking apologetic when she had no need to be, stumbling through her words to try and switch back to the whole meaning of this conversation that was slipping through Jessica's grasp.

"Right… Yeah. Of course. Either way, these muggle Veelas, left unchecked and unmated-"

"Unmated? Are they some sort of fucking animal kingdom species?"

Harry's eyes grew hard then, yet, even as they were looking at her dead on, Harry must have been seeing something else, something only housed in her mind. The names of people where lost on Jessica, but the meaning was clear. _Don't underestimate them. Don't assume. Don't guess._

"Yes. They're not human, not fully. I'm not human either. We look human, we walk, dress, talk just like you, like muggles, but never make the mistake of thinking that is what we are. The most important thing that separates us from muggles is feeling. Feeling is what powers us, makes us able to do what it is we do. Wizards and witches, Veelas, we feel deeper, stronger… More irrationally and we often became obsessed with a feeling. Tom Riddle, his fear of death became so strong, so extreme, he went to such lengths to eradicate that fear. He killed, maimed and did things only possible from your deepest, darkest nightmares. Snape's love for my mother lead him through decades of torture, darkness and lies that even till the very end, bleeding out in my arms, he could never let that love go. Dumbledore's need for control lead him to a life of using people like pawns with the only moral justification he sold himself being it was for the greater good. Look at me, really look at me, shit hits the fan and I automatically think self-sacrifice and suicide will fix everything. I can't help it, the feeling… It drowns me… Eats me…Till it's all I can do…"

She was lost somewhere inky and oily and Jessica didn't know how to drag her back. So, she tried to drag her back onto topic, hoping to get that foul shadow lurking in the corner of her vibrant eyes to wither away back into nothingness.

"So, Kilgrave isn't human, trust me, you don't have to preach that to me."

Harry shook her head, curls bouncing, as if she could physically push her thought away. Jessica knew what that was like. It never worked. It only held them at bay. Ire and wrath took the place of that shadow, and weirdly, Jessica was just glad that dank thing was gone.

"But you're not seeing the consequences here. Kilgrave is a Veela with a calling, normally, they mate young, in their late teens at the very latest, to a witch or wizard that has a magical core, something their calling can bond to and ground itself. If they don't mate, they go insane, they rampage, sometimes burning villages or towns down, other times more subtly, like weaving a pathway of used and abused people in their wake. Veelas have the innate need to physically manifest their inner world into the real one. It's instinctual for them. They feel sad, they make people sad. They get angry, they make others angry or destroy things. They feel used and abandoned… They… Well, just look at what Kilgrave has been up to."

Jessica bit back the sharp retort that what Kilgrave was, what he did, was anything but natural or instinctual. But now was not the time or place to nit-pick at wording choice, and so she let the anger simmer in the blackness of her bowels.

"So, Kilgrave is a Veela, an unmated one by the sound of it and because he's going off the deep end, he's trying to drag the rest of us down with him?"

Harry wouldn't meet her eye, not as she strolled to the window, peering out and down to the people scuttling below, none the wiser to just how big and how dangerous their world really was. Sometimes, most times, Jessica envied them and their ignorance.

"Was… Was unmated."

Jessica huffed and scowled.

"And you've lost me again. I thought you just said they go insane when they aren't 'mated', or whatever else it is."

Jessica could see Harry's shoulders tense, plains becoming rigid and hard, the trembling gone and all that was left was stone.

"They do, Kilgrave was falling down the rabbit hole… Until I walked up to him."

It took a while for the meaning to hit home, but when it did, Jessica exploded.

"No… No, no, no, no! You're not saying what I think you're saying!"

What did it mean? Was Harry under his influence? Could she hear him? Could he hear her? Harry whirled on her, face guarded but nostrils flared and words searing.

"It's rare! Do you know how hard it is to find a magical core that fits a calling? They need to be near identical. I had no fucking clue that his would fit with mine! Do you think I wanted this?! I've had one mad man in my mind already, and now I have one permanently glued in there! I know what he's done, what he's willing to do and somehow, he still fits in with my magic! Mine! Do you know what that realisation feels like?! Huh?"

Jessica stood up, fist clenching at her side. She wanted to punch something. To pulverize it. Turn it to dust.

"So what?! You two are, what was it you called it, linked now? Mated?! What the fuck does that mean?! Is that why the spell didn't work? The killing thing? Can he see what your fucking seeing?!"

Harry began pacing again and it took everything within Jessica not to trail her, not to slam her up into a wall and let her fists fly… But it wasn't Harry's fault. There would have been no way to know and now it was all too late. The two were linked, whatever that fucking meant.

"No, he can't bloody see me, or read my thoughts. It's more physical. What happens to me, happens to him. I… Well, death doesn't stick with me. It never has and as today has shown, likely never will. Those people… They were going to kill themselves if I threw one more hit at him and I thought, with being linked and all, if I hit myself with the spell, it wouldn't stick with me but would with him. However, it seems like I'm not the only one with upsides to this linking business."

Now it was Jessica's turn to throw her bottle of rum at the wall, the glass joining the graveyard at the bottom.

"Upside, what fucking upside?!"

Harry looked desperate, her curls seemingly growing bigger as she rounded on Jessica.

"His calling doesn't work on me. His power, his control… It's nothing to me. I'm the fire-wall to his little fucking virus!"

Harry couldn't be controlled? Well… That opened some doors and quelled some fears. If she wasn't under his control, if he couldn't see or hear her and this 'link' was purely physical like Harry was trying to sell her it was, then this could be helpful in the long run. Only, Jessica doubted it was only physical. Not by how distressed Harry seemed to be. Then again, how would Jessica like it if it turned out she had been tied to Kilgrave and there was no seemingly way out of the bond? She would likely off herself… Again, it looked like Harry didn't even have that option. Further realisation set in and Jessica felt cold, so very, very cold.

"But your inability to die has bled over to him in return… That's why he came back to life..."

Harry's pacing faltered, and Jessica could see her viciously chewing on the inside of her cheek.

"Meaning we can't off the bastard. And if somehow we did-"

"Let me guess, you would croak too?"

"Pretty much. Whatever happens to him, happens to me too now."

The fight left them both as they flopped onto the couch, one of the only surviving pieces of furniture in Jessica's apartment.

"Look, Jessica, I'm sorry. Really, I am. I thought I could finish it. I could stop anyone else from getting hurt and I've… I've only juiced him up, like I'm a hundred amp battery that his jacked himself into. I've messed everything up and I'm not sure how to fix it, If I can fix it at all. We're linked and no one has ever been unlinked before… But if anyone at all is going to be the first, it'll be me. I'll fix this."

Guilt gnawed and slobbered over Jessica's marrow and cartilage.

"You didn't mess it up."

God, she needed a drink, or ten. While Harry spoke, the question Jessica had been dodging finally reared its ugly head and Jessica had no option but to come clean.

"What do you mean? I've practically made the guy immortal, tipped him off that we're gunning for him and by the way I've woken up, I'm guessing he somehow got away. I mean, if you hadn't of gotten there so fast… Wait, how did you get there so fast?"

They were both staring ahead, both refusing to look at the other and Jessica's tongue felt like it was nothing but a swollen piece of useless flesh.

"I was already trailing Malcom. I was planning on jumping Kilgrave, drugging him and dragging him back to a cell I have set up. Only, as we got him out of the park and into the car, his goons we're already laying in wait and snatched him back. He had it all planned out. You see… Even if you weren't there today, he would have already been tipped off."

Jessica left the rest unsaid. How she wouldn't have told Harry she had got him if she had succeeded. How she had, in the end, used her. How, when she had died, her, Trish and Simpson had left her in the park, forgotten and broken, only dragging Kilgrave's body away, having only gone back and gotten her when the plan fell through. How Harry was sporting a bruised jaw from a punch Jessica had thrown at an unconscious Kilgrave. How Jessica had suspected the linking since noticing. Fuck. Jessica felt like a huge, steaming pile of shit. But Harry knew. _She knew._

"Only, I was already masquerading as Malcolm and when my façade fell, you thought you would wait it out and slip in if I got him down and out? That's why it took you so long to pick up the phone. Planning to vulture it? Make me do the hard work and then come in for the spoils? You… You only came back for me when he got away, didn't you? You knew we were linked, you just didn't know how and how deeply... You only brought me back here because of that link, hoping to use it to track Kilgrave again..."

Jessica could only spit out two words.

"Pretty much."

Silence began to choke them again, digging its claws in deep prior to Harry's burst of half mad laughter. Catching up to Harry's thought process, Jessica couldn't help joining in. Harry had tried to screw her over, with the best of intentions as root and trunk, but still fucked her over. Jessica had screwed Harry over, not having set out to, but falling into that trap and while both had been busy messing the others plans up, Kilgrave had come along, flipped their board over and screwed both of them over. What a fucking mess they had dug themselves into. Finally settling, Jessica partially turned to Harry.

"Look, if we're ever going to work together, we need to start actually communicating, and this is a big thing coming from me. Separately, we nearly had him. Together, working as one, we might snag the bastard. We need this, especially now that he knows about us being on his tail, now that his linked-"

Jessica cut herself off, she didn't need to finish. Harry, unquestionably, knew what that entailed and what it meant to her and her life. Jessica didn't need to remind the woman, didn't need to dig the knife in deeper. Harry eventually made eye contact, staring intensely and almost serenely into Jessica's gaze. If she was a weaker woman, she would have looked away from the hefty look. But she wasn't and hold it she did.

"And when we do snag him? What will you do then?"

It was what was left unsaid that spoke the most. Would she kill him? In turn kill her? If it was possible to do such a thing. Jessica had dreamed of it, she wouldn't lie about that, fantasized about it. Snapped neck. Pummelled face. Immolation. Drowning. Stabbing. Only, as Harry looked at her, face wide and open and damningly not judging despite knowing full well what she wanted to do, no blame etching in her skin or face, Jessica fell short. Harry, no doubt, wouldn't blame her if she chose that road, in all honesty, Jessica thought the woman would still help her even if it meant her own demise and yet… And yet.

"I'm not going to kill an innocent, and trust me, I can practically smell your goodness oozing out of you. It's a bit sickening, really. I'll break a few bones though, if you can handle that."

Harry let out a dry chuckle that lacked all mirth. The sound felt like sand paper on her nerves, all gritty sadness and clustered grim resignation. Harry was too young to be able to make a sound like that.

"Trust me, I've handled a lot worse. Look, I need to talk to a friend, I'll be gone for a day or two. If there is a way to undo this, to cut the link or numb it, she'll now how or at least help me look for a way."

Jessica nodded.

"I'll fold in tight and try and think of a plan. Something. Anything."

The next words out of her mouth Jessica had not meant to ask, not really sure she truly wanted to know the answer, but as soon as the thought fluttered through her jumbled mind, they were out in the air and poisoning it.

"Have you… What's it like? Do you… Do you feel him at all?"

Harry's head lolled back onto the backrest of the couch, gaze staring bottomlessly up at the ceiling as her hand came up to idly scratch and rub at her chest, on the opposite side of her beating heart.

"I… I feel his heart beat, as if his heart is right beside my own. Only, it's beating at a different rhythm to mine, burning my lungs and making my blood feel as if It's going in the wrong direction. I don't think there's enough room in my chest. Shit, ouch!"

Harry lurched forward, bent over in half as she scrabbled for her forearm, more swears trailing off her lips in a litany of repressed anger. When Jessica leaned over her to catch a proper look, she had grown pale, well, paler and was clutching at her wrist, watching the bare skin of her forearm with wide eyes… Only, it wasn't staying bare.

Letters were beginning to slice there way down the unmarked skin, superficially light, but still deep enough to draw blood and sting. Like deep cat scratches. Jessica's breath hitched as the familiar scrawl finally ended, and Harry glanced up at her, teeth bared in either pain or anger… No, both.

 _Peek-a-Boo, I'll see you soon._

"We don't need to come for him… He's coming for you."

It was all Jessica could say. She had to look away from the mark, away from Harry as the vomit began to sting the back of her tongue. It seemed he knew about the link too, perhaps not enough as Harry evidently did, but enough to realize he could taunt her, them, through it, and yet his self preservation was the only thing stopping him from pushing it further, protecting Harry.

"You still got that cell decked out and ready?"

Slowly turning to face her once more, Jessica gave a one-word answer, not trusting her voice or gut in holding in the emotions she was really feeling.

"Yes?"

Harry's answering smile nearly made her feel as sick as the carved message her arm displayed. Yet again, the smaller woman lost her, but whatever she had cooking up in that brain of hers must have been as deliciously dark as her smile.

"Well, it would be a mighty shame for a good cell to go to waste."

* * *

 **A.N:** I was originally going to cut this chapter after Harry cast the Avada Kadavra, then I was going to cut if after the death/dream sequence, but then I realized I've made you beautiful people wait a full on year for this chapter and so, I offer this up as a 'I'm super sorry' gift (Please accept it!)

I've been away from writing for a while now (Due to life being a bit shitty), but I'm hoping to slide back in and with all the lovely reviews for this fic, as well as inspiration hitting home, I wanted to update this first.

 **I know there wasn't much Kilgrave this chapter, but listen!** This stuff just needed to be gotten out of the way so I can get down and dirty with this fic, hence why its all piled into the same chapter, and now that the two are officially linked, with him in her head and vice versa, there's going to be a lot more Kilgrave from here on out. Plus, we'll be learning there's a lot more to the Veela bond then Fleur explained. I don't won't to give too much away, but think of this as a roller-coaster and now that we've reached the precipice, the drop is going to be hard and fast! **So expect more Kilgrave, more Veela juju, more mishaps, drama and over all, shit hitting the fan! This is going to be so much fun to write!**

 _ **THANK YOU ALL! **_ I hope this chapter was worth the monstrous wait, and I really am sorry about that. **A BIG THANK YOU FOR ALL THE REVIEWERS,** honestly, you guys and your words are the reason this plot bunny made it past chapter one, and why I keep getting drawn back to this fic. I really do hope you liked this chapter.

 **As always, please drop a review** , they're the steam to this little engine!

Until next time, stay beautiful! ~AlwaysEatTheRude21


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